Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation 144385686X, 9781443856867

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Practices of Abstract Art

Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation Edited by

Isabel Wünsche and Wiebke Gronemeyer

Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation Edited by Isabel Wünsche and Wiebke Gronemeyer This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Isabel Wünsche, Wiebke Gronemeyer and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9734-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9734-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 PART ONE THE POLITICS OF ABSTRACT ART: BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSAL Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Wassily Kandinsky and František Kupka: Between Metaphysics and Psychophysics Isabel Wünsche Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Creating the Ideal: František Kupka’s Social Reform and Anarchist Abstraction Naomi Hume Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 53 Kandinsky, Anarchism, and the Narrative of Modernism Rose-Carol Washton Long Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 69 Producing a Grammar of Painting: Color and Form in the Manuscripts of Ivan Kliun Viktoria Schindler Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 95 Barcelona—Paris—“New Cusco”—Montevideo: The Routes to Roots of Joaquín Torres–García’s South American Abstraction Aarnoud Rommens Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 117 Congdon’s Abstract Art and the Metaphysics of Immediacy Nieves Acedo

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 139 The Abstraction of Behavior Gordon Monro Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 159 Digital Abstraction: Modeling Intersensory Perception in Electronic Art Birgit Mersmann PART TWO THE INTERCULTURALITY OF ABSTRACT ART: BETWEEN CO-OPTATION AND APPROPRIATION Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 179 Ernst Wilhelm Nay: Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe—Artistic Concepts and Cultural Policy in Postwar Germany Franziska Müller Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 195 Free Art in Free Berlin: German-American Support for Berlin Art in the 1950s Dorothea Schöne Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 207 The Russian Boom: Abstract Art as a Means for Cultural Diplomacy between The Soviet Union and West Germany (1970-1990) Elena Korowin Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 225 Abstract Art in South Africa: Then and Now Marilyn Martin Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 249 What is the Role of Abstraction within the Concerns of Visual Art Language Contemporaneously? Wendy Kelly Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 267 The Appropriation of “Abstraction” beyond the Aesthetic Wiebke Gronemeyer

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 285 Refresh Abstraction! Day Glo Neo Geo Pamela C. Scorzin Contributors ............................................................................................. 299

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 1.1. Cover of Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1912). Figure 1.2. Cover of František Kupka, TvoĜení v umČní výtvarném (Prague: S.V.U. Manes, 1923). Copyright VG Bild–Kunst 2016. Figure 2.1. Illustration for fascicle cover, Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (1905–1908). University of Chicago Library. Figure 2.2. Illustration for chapter “Education,” in Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (1905–1908). University of Chicago Library. Figure 2.3. Illustration for “Preface” to Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (1905–1908). University of Chicago Library. Figure 3.1. Wassily Kandinsky, Sound of Trumpets (Study for Large Resurrection), 1911. Watercolor, ink. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Figure 3.2. Vasily Koren, Scene from Revelation VIII: 10–13, 1696. Colored woodcut. Reproduced in Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii, Kartiny iz Biblii i Apokalipsisa, raboty mastera Korenia (Paintings from the Bible and the Apocalypse, made by the Master of Korenia), St. Petersburg, 1881. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Figure 3.3. Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints’ Day II, 1911. Oil on canvas. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Figure 3.4. Detail from the Last Judgment, etching, first half of the nineteenth century. Reproduced in Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii, Kartiny iz Biblii i Apokalipsisa, raboty mastera Korenia (Paintings from the Bible and the Apocalypse, made by the Master of Korenia), St. Petersburg, 1881. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Figure 4.1. Ivan Kliun, Suprematist Composition, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 62.5 cm. Private collection, Europe. Figure 4.2. Ivan Kliun, Color Wheel and Color Triangle, modeled after W. Ostwald, undated, unpublished. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 5.1. Joaquín Torres–García, South America’s Inverted Map. Ink drawing on paper, reproduced in Circulo y cuadrado no. 1, May 1936. Image copyright Museo Torres García, Montevideo. Figure 5.2. Juan de Santa Cruz, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, [Cosmological Drawing]. Ink on paper, Relación de anteguedades deste Reyno del Pirú, 1613. MSS/3169 (h.144v), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Figure 5.3. Joaquín Torres–García, Estructura, 1935. Oil on cardboard, 79 x 62.2 cm. Private collection, Montevideo. Figure 5.4. Inca wall (foundation of a house). Remnants of the so-called “Sinchi Roca Palace” (Hatun Rumiyoc) structure, built around 1520 in Cusco under Sinchi Roca, second Inca emperor. Raoul d’Harcourt collection, c. 1910–1919. Musée du quai Branly, Paris. Photo copyright Musée du quai Branly, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais. Figure 6.1. William Congdon, Bowery (Dark), 1948. 20 x 25 cm. Courtesy of The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Figure 6.2. William Congdon, Athens No. 1 (Acropolis), 1953. 100 x 145 cm. Courtesy of The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Figure 6.3. William Congdon nel suo studio, 1981. Photograph Elio and Stefano Ciol, Casarsa. Courtesy of The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Figure 7.1. Jacques de Vaucanson, Digesting Duck (canard digérateur), 1738. Image reproduced in “Automata: A Historical and Technological Study,” by Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz, Editions du Griffon, Neuchâtel, 1958. Figure 7.2. Cameron Rose, Begin, 2012. Still from video. Copyright Cameron Rose 2012. Figure 7.3. Alexander Calder, The Lace on the Edge of Your Panties, 1947. Sheet metal, wire and paint, 33 x 190 x 47 cm. Calder Foundation, New York. Figure 8.1. Free characters produced with Golan Levin’s Alphabet Synthesis Machine. Copyright Golan Levin. Figure 9.1. Richard Hamilton, Just what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956. Collage, 26 x 25 cm, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Sammlung Zundel. Copyright VG Bild–Kunst 2016. Figure 9.2. Ruhr–Festspiele Recklinghausen, Exhibition titled Mensch und Form unserer Zeit (Man and form in our times), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen 1952. Copyright Museen der Stadt Recklinghausen.

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Figure 10.1. Hans Jaenisch: Airlift (Luftbrücke (Rosinenbomber)), 1948/1949. Temperarelief, 46 x 140 cm. Copyright Fritz–Winter– Haus. Figure 10.2. Contemporary Berlin Artists (Exhibition View, 1951). Photograph, dimensions unknown. Copyright Cleveland Museum of Art. Figure 11.1. Heinrich Hoffmann, Paris World Fair, 1937. German and Soviet Pavillions. Hoffmann Archiv, Bayrische Staatsbibliothek München. Figure 11.2. Alexander Rodchenko, Spatial Construction no. 12, c. 1920– 1921. Reconstruction by Aleksandr Lavrentiev, 1989. Plywood, wire, 61 x 83.7 x 47 cm. Private collection, Moscow. Figure 12.1. David Koloane, Commuters, 2008. Drypoint etching, 25.4 x 50 cm. Courtesy of David Krut Projects. Figure 12.2. Karel Nel. Stacked Coda, 2008. Pastel and sprayed pigment on bonded fibre–fabric, 250 x 80 cm. Copyright Karel Nel. Courtesy of the artist and Art First, London. Figure 12.3. Jan-Henri Booyens. Joseph Beuys is ’n Leuenaar, 2014. Oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm. The New Church Museum, Cape Town. Figure 13.1. Dick Watkins, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 182.5 x 182.5 cm. Courtesy of Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney. Copyright Dick Watkins, licensed by Viscopy, 2016. Figure 13.2. Magda Cebokli, Square #5, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 101.5 x 101.5 cm. Property of the artist. Photograph by Andrew Noble. Figure 14.1. Liam Gillick, Big Conference Platform Platform, 1998. Sculpture display in the exhibition Adventures of the Black Square at the Whitechapel Gallery, January 15 to April 6, 2015. Courtesy of the Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive. Figure 14.2. Falke Pisano, The Complex Object, 2007. Performance, 25 min, Lisson Gallery, 2007. Courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Hollybush Gardens. Figure 14.3 and 14.4. Falke Pisano, The Complex Object, 2007. Video 21:40 min, Performance 25 min. Video still/slide-series. Courtesy of Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Hollybush Gardens. Figure 15.1. Screenshot of the Dazed & Confused website, April 4, 2015. Figure 15.2. Louis Vuitton, Spring/Summer 2013. Copyright Louis Vuitton.

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List of Illustrations

Plates Plate 2.1. František Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors, 1912. Oil on canvas, 211 x 220 cm. National Gallery in Prague. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Plate 2.2. František Kupka, Ballad/ Joys, 1901. Oil on wood with wax underpainting, 83.5 x 126.5 cm. National Gallery in Prague. Copyright 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Plate 2.3. František Kupka, Disks of Newton. Study for Fugue in Two Colors, 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 73.7 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Copyright 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Plate 3.1. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911. Oil on canvas, 190 x 275 cm. Private collection, New York. Plate 3.2. Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Composition V, 1911. Oil on canvas, 95 x 139 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Inv. no. GE–10077. Image copyright The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin. Plate 4.1. Ivan Kliun, Rushing Landscape, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 106 x 87 cm. Private collection, Europe. Plate 4.2. Ivan Kliun, Spherical Nonobjective Composition, around 1922– 1925. Oil on canvas, 101.8 x 70.7 cm. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki. Plate 4.3. Ivan Kliun, Study of Color and Form on a Black Wheel, 1931. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki. Plate 4.4. Ivan Kliun, On the Problem of Composition. Constructing Images according to Decorative and Organic Principles, 1942. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki. Plate 5.1. Joaquín Torres–García, Arte Universal, 1932. Oil on canvas, 54 x 46 cm. Private collection, Paris. Plate 5.2. Joaquín Torres–García, Infinite Construction, 1942. Oil on canvas, 52 x 36.5 cm. Private collection, Washington, D.C.. Plate 6.1. William Congdon, Terra ghiacciata verso primavera, 1983. 80 x 100 cm. Copyright The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Plate 6.2. William Congdon, Cielo con bianco, 1989. 60 x 70 cm. Copyright The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Plate 6.3. William Congdon, Impronta, 1990. 90 x 80 cm. Copyright The William G. Congdon Foundation, Milano. Plate 7.1. Gordon Monro, Dissonant Particles, 2004/2005. Still from video. Copyright Gordon Monro, 2004.

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Plate 7.2. Jon McCormack, Eden, 2000. Installation photograph. Copyright Jon McCormack, 2000. Plate 8.1. Golan Levin, Ghost Pole Propagator, 2007. Copyright Golan Levin. Plate 8.2. Hung Keung, Bloated City/Skinny Language, 2007. Copyright Hung Keung. Plate 9.1. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Große Chromatik (Great Chromatic), 1954. Oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm. Private Collection. Copyright VG Bild– Kunst, 2016. Plate 9.2. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Stellar in Grau (Stellar in Grey), 1955. Oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm. Private Collection. Copyright VG Bild– Kunst, 2016. Plate 11.1. Kazimir Malevich, Self-portrait, 1933. Oil on canvas, 73 x 66 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Plate 11.2. Olga Rozanova, Green Stripe, 1917. Oil on canvas, 71.2 x 49 cm. State Museum Preserve Rostov Kremlin. Plate 12.1. Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1965. Oil on canvas, 93.3 x 60.3 cm. Collection: Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Image courtesy of Galerie Mikhael Andersen, Copenhagen. Plate 12.2. Kevin Atkinson, Aqua–A–Blast, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 198 cm. Collection: Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg. Plate 12.3. Dan Halter, Fabrication 3, 2012. Archival inkjet prints and woven archival inkjet prints on acid-free paper, 47 x 84cm. Images courtesy of the artist. Plate 13.1. Wendy Kelly, Line upon Line, 2011. Mixed technique on canvas, 160 x 280 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 13.2. Col Jordan, Mosaic 8–The Gate, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 160 x 280 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Plate 15.1. and 15.2. Katrin Keller, Sweet Dreams of Color, 2010. Oil on Canvas, 65 x 65 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

INTRODUCTION

A century has now passed since art patrons, collectors, and the general public were first confronted with the “nonobjective” compositions of artists such as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Theo van Doesburg. The introduction and continued evolution of abstract art in the twentieth century altered our understanding of the production, meaning, and reception of art in aesthetics and art history; its influence in fields such as art history, philosophy, psychology, history, visual and cultural studies remains as strong as ever, but not without criticism. There are those who see it as a redundant strategy that has lost its potential to articulate the ever more complex concerns of our contemporary times. Abstract art has always been an intellectual practice, one deeply concerned with the capacity for self-reflection: the individual within society, the artistic within the cultural, and the real within the ideal. Recent decades have seen renewed interest in the phenomenon of abstract art as a means for addressing and reflecting the conditions under which art and culture are produced. The use of abstraction by the early twentieth-century avant-garde as a visual strategy linked to social and political utopias has drawn the attention of contemporary artists. At the same time, however, the language of abstract art continues to be freely co-opted for use in marketing strategies of mainstream culture; this despite efforts, particularly by postwar artists, to draw on abstraction as a medium and style of expression for creating sheltered spaces for visual art, resistant to narratives of governmental rule or the culture industry of late capitalism. There are many individual studies of abstract artists and movements— almost always with a historical emphasis. Some good studies such as Andrew Benjamin’s What is Abstraction (Wiley, 1996) or Briony Fer’s On Abstract Art (Yale University Press, 2000) turn out to have a fairly restricted focus. Works like Harold Osborne’s Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1979), Mel Gooding’s Abstract Art (Cambridge University Press, 2001), or Kirk Varnedoe’s Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (Princeton University Press, 2006) are very much oriented towards the specific character of the tendencies they are surveying and lack a unifying theme and the depth of this volume. Other recent comprehensive and in-depth studies, including

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Bob Nickas’ Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (Phaidon Press, 2009), Maria Lind’s Abstraction (MIT University Press, 2013), or the “Abstraktion” special issue of Texte zur Kunst of March 2008 and the “Neue Abstraktion” special issue of Kunstforum of January/February 2011, fail to sufficiently address the historical prewar perspective on abstract art, leaving the judgment of abstract art as a cultural phenomenon without roots. Catalogs to relevant exhibitions such as Inventing Abstraction 1910– 1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, curated by Leah Dickerman (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012), Concrete Invention: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Reflections on Geometric Abstraction from Latin America and its Legacy, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and Gabriel Pérez Barreiro (Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2013), and Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015, curated by Iwona Blazwick (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015) generally do not include in-depth studies extending beyond the selection of works in the respective exhibitions. This collection of essays investigates the ambivalent role that abstraction has played and continues to play in the visual arts and cultures of the last one hundred years, particularly how the language of abstraction speaks to the political, social, and cultural conditions of our times. To discuss abstract art as a cultural phenomenon means to articulate its politics, addressing its contemporary contextualization in art history, philosophy, and visual studies, as well exploring how abstract art as a medium of artistic practice reflects the diversity of twentieth-century concerns. The volume addresses the ambivalence with which abstract art is perceived in the realms of theory as well as practice and thereby responds to a void in publications that seem to either solely discuss the historical value of abstract art or focus on its contemporary demise as a critical form of expression. In the field of practice, cultural institutions are responding to the growing interest in abstraction of artists by organizing exhibitions with the intent of examining the contemporary relevance of abstraction for the visual arts. The contributors to this volume reflect the diverse contexts in which abstract art can be perceived and discussed. Art historians, philosophers, cultural theorists, and artists come together to re-contextualize the formal legacies of abstract art and re-institute it as a cultural phenomenon by means of social interpretation. Considering historical examples of artistic practice, from the early pioneers of abstraction to late modernism, the essays in this volume explore theoretical and critical narratives that seek to

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articulate new perspectives on the legacy of abstraction in the visual arts. From metaphysical considerations and philosophical reflections to debates about interculturality and global perspectives on abstract art, the contributing scholars are interested in looking back at more than one hundred years of abstraction in the visual arts from a contemporary point of view that acknowledges and is informed by the many social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of artistic practices. The common theme that each of the essays share is the phenomenon of abstract art as not only a cultural, but also a political phenomenon. This is then reinforced by the detailed analysis of artists’ œuvres, particular works, or specific exhibitions. Analysis of the major trajectories of abstract art is based on the perspective of specific practices and case studies. This does not mean forgoing a comprehensive sense of its chronological progression, merely a perspective is chosen that largely defies the shortcomings of articulating a “story of art” sense of progression as quasi–narrative and considers the evolution of the phenomenon of abstract art from a contemporary outlook. A special feature of the book is its global character—bringing together contributions by emerging younger art historians and cultural researchers as well as more established scholars from Europe, South America, South Africa, the United States, and Australia. The book is distinctive in that it is organized into two main sections: Part One—The Politics of Abstract Art: Between the Individual and the Universal and Part Two—The Interculturality of Abstract Art: Between Co-optation and Appropriation. The essays in the first section address by means of in-depth studies of artistic œuvres or specific works the relation between actual practice and more theoretical or philosophical investigations into the nature of abstraction. The common denominator of the contributions in part one is the process by which abstract art serves a means of political influence and engagement through its transformation of the individual artistic experience into a universal language of expression. Isabel Wünsche presents a detailed comparison of the emergence of abstraction in the work of František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky and their gradual shift from a mystical Symbolist orientation towards a more scientific approach in their theoretical writing, processes of artistic creation, and visual perception. Acknowledging that even the most mystical of the pioneers of abstract art found themselves engaged in a dialectic discourse in their efforts to forge a link between the physical world and the spiritual realm revealed in their work, she discusses the ways in which these artists interrelated mystical orientation, scientific

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inquiry, and psychophysiological factors in the processes of artistic creation and visual perception. Naomi Hume focuses on the social and political beliefs that shaped František Kupka’s caricatures and illustrations and were the basis for his abstract experiments. She demonstrates the extent to which Kupka’s interest in lifestyle reform and anarchism fueled his experiments with conjuring movement in paint and gave rise to his theoretical work on the dismissal of representation and narrative in painting and the physical form of the artwork in general. Rose-Carol Washton Long’s discussion evolves around Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 Composition V, which she uses as a backdrop to analyze how Kandinsky himself referred to his works, provoking an interpretation that reveals an anarchist order. She then goes on to explore how artistic practices in the early twentieth century addressed issues of spectatorship in an attempt to lift the general public from its complacency, highlighting the importance of such motivational factors for perceiving art in the broader political context of contemporary times. Viktoria Schindler offers an in-depth study of Russian avant-garde artist Ivan Kliun’s artistic practice and discourse on color and form as outlined in his yet unpublished manuscripts. In theory and practice, Kliun developed a grammar for abstract art and explored the impact that elements of art such as color, form, texture, light, space, and their principles of combination have on the viewer’s psyche. Schindler’s essay on Kliun offers a new perspective on the work of a largely unknown artist of the Russian avant-garde and the development of nonobjective art in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century. Aarnoud Rommens looks into the life of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres–García who, in 1934, returned to his native country after fortythree years in Europe. Rommens draws comparisons between Torres– García’s European education and his South American intellectual roots and shows how the artist’s abstract aesthetics were reframed by the paradigm of pre-Columbian art. By identifying with the culture of ancient Andean cultures, Torres–García, who never came to experience these ancient works in person, created an artificial “memory palace.” The author reveals how the mythological character of abstraction caters to a reappropriation of its aesthetics in various cultural contexts. Nieves Acedo offers a study of American postwar painter William Congdon’s abstract œuvre, which largely falls outside of the canon within which abstract art has been perceived. She links Congdon’s later works to notions of immediacy cultivated in the concept of action painting.

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Congdon viewed the quest for immediacy as intrinsically related to the utopian and the ideal rather than the real; to elaborate this aspect, the author discusses Congdon’s work in relation to Aristotelian metaphysics, particularly the idea of matter—here specifically, the painted work of art—conveying the unity of apparent opposites such as surface and ground. Gordon Monro presents an in-depth study of how abstract art both exhibits and/or is derived from a process of movement and change—a process that is intrinsic to how the artist creates the work and which Monro calls “abstraction of behavior.” By referring to examples of art history and current artistic practices, Monro, a new-media artist, discusses three aspects of an abstract work of art that need to simultaneously be considered: its static visual appearance, its observable behavior, and its hidden mechanism. These become the source of a conceptual metaphor that is in itself essentially nonrepresentational. Birgit Mersmann engages with the recent new interest in abstract art, particularly the practices of abstraction as a universal language or programming code that evolved with the development of digital media technologies and new methods of data visualization. Discussing examples of contemporary digital artistic practices, Mersmann develops a model of digital abstraction in which the artwork itself becomes a digital network of crossmodalities designed by the artist and manipulated by means of the apperceptive (inter)action and response system of the user-viewer. She argues for a new art theory of digital abstraction based on the classification and concept of hypermodality as a hyperbinding of sense modalities. Part Two examines the effects that the production, meaning, and reception of abstract art had on cultural practices such as exhibitionmaking and artistic production itself. The contributions in this section especially engage with the ways in which the phenomenon of abstract art relates to economic processes and the politics of representation, particularly in terms of the cultural protocols that inform them. Franziska Müller discusses the work of Ernst Wilhelm Nay in the light of artistic practices, philosophical concepts, and cultural politics in postwar Germany. Nay promoted the idea of abstract art as a world language, an instrument of cognition and orientation, one well suited to visually expressing the necessary changes in cultural tradition associated with the arrival of a new era. Exploring Nay’s artwork in the context of his theory of abstract art as a universal language, she reveals the ambivalence between autonomy and co-optation of art as a political tool with regards to the relationship between art and the political realm.

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Dorothea Schöne closely examines the political connotations of abstract art in postwar Germany in the light of American support for German abstract art. Abstract art was seen as an expression of freedom and democracy and used as a political tool to counter both National Socialist propaganda as well as socialist and Stalinist politics of the time. Analyzing a selection of exhibitions that toured West Germany as well as the United States, Schöne pays particular attention to the inherent conflict between the artists’ apolitical intentions and the political agendas of cultural policy makers. Elena Korowin discusses the various diplomatic approaches to abstract art in the Soviet Union and West Germany between 1970 and 1990, paying particular attention to the level of ostracism to which abstract artists were treated by the Soviet cultural and political authorities. Analyzing art exhibitions from the Soviet Union that were shown in West Germany in the period from World War II to the breakdown of the communist system in 1991, she shows how the political establishment attempted to use the suggestive power of art for its interests. Marilyn Martin’s discussion of abstract art in South Africa focuses on the relationship between abstract art and social engagement in the antiapartheid movement, which generally favored figuration and called for a timely rethinking of abstract art production in South Africa, her concern being that the post-apartheid generation of artists is in danger of falling prey to an opportunistic market logic that would lead to a rehearsal of art history rather than a radical transformation of abstract art, which would subsequently no longer remain suffused with its own poetry and polemics. Wendy Kelly, an artist working and living in Melbourne, Australia, examines the impact that the concept of postmodernism as a style, movement, and philosophy has had on all forms of abstraction. Because of its preference for figuration, postmodernism is often perceived as limiting the potential of abstract art. Instead, Kelly suggests that postmodernism could contribute to a loosening of “the perceived straight jacket of Modernism with its rigid lineal categorization of trends and movements” and that this would benefit abstraction. In support of her thesis, she embarks on an analysis of her own work and that of fellow Australian artists. Wiebke Gronemeyer’s essay explores the aesthetic and conceptual concerns towards abstraction of contemporary artists such as Liam Gillick, Falke Pisano, and Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. The essay particularly looks at forms of critical appropriation of concepts of abstraction prevalent in contemporary aesthetics and conceptual artistic practices. This leads her to question the ways in which contemporary

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artistic practices—taking into account the historically strong, self-reflexive approach of abstract art towards the conditions of art production—can articulate contemporary forms of abstraction beyond the aesthetic, and thereby deal with the often proclaimed paradigm between modernism’s self-reflexivity and postmodernism’s appropriation of aesthetic languages. Pamela Scorzin closely examines the recent fetish of abstract art in contemporary lifestyle magazines and fashion brands; this is supported by an in-depth analysis of the work of abstract artist Karin Keller. Scorzin critically addresses the ways in which contemporary forms of abstraction serve as a metaphor for forms of creativity and mastery in line with mainstream pop culture, giving rise to forms of visual merchandising and marketing that co-opt the aesthetics of abstraction in the visual arts, an area once largely opposed to mass culture. This volume seeks to progressively expand the boundaries of thinking about abstract art by engaging it in its increasingly diverse cultural environment. In contemporary times, making, exhibiting, criticizing, and analyzing abstract art is no longer grounded solely in traditional aesthetics, but centered on a number of political, cultural, economic, and social issues influencing artistic practices and their perception. It is beyond the scope and intent of this volume and our perspective to make aesthetic assessments or judgments of abstract art today. Rather, we hope to offer a platform for meaningful discussions of how the processes of abstraction in artistic practices affect our world.

PART ONE THE POLITICS OF ABSTRACT ART: BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSAL

CHAPTER ONE WASSILY KANDINSKY AND FRANTIŠEK KUPKA: BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND PSYCHOPHYSICS ISABEL WÜNSCHE

The emergence of abstract art around 1910 was fundamentally shaped by the theoretical considerations of the Czech painter František Kupka (1871–1957) and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). A number of parallels can be seen in their artistic work and theoretical writings. The two artists shared similar worldviews and artistic interests, found inspiration in theosophy and the occult, and promoted a subjectiveintuitive approach to art. Drawing on contemporary artistic developments, philosophical ideas, and the latest discoveries in the natural sciences, each developed detailed conceptual approaches to abstraction, which they set down in pioneering theoretical works: Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst) and Kukpa’s Creation in the Visual Arts (La Creation dans les arts plastique). Kandinsky’s book, the more influential of the two, was published in 1911; 1 Kupka formulated his aesthetic treatise during roughly the same period, from 1909 to 1913; however, its intended publication in French, in 1920, was never realized and the manuscript was not published until 1923,

1

Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst: insbesondere in der Malerei (Munich: Piper 1912). The first edition appeared at the end of 1911 but was dated 1912; the second and third editions followed in 1912. First complete English translation: Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, ed. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946). See also Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” in Lindsay/Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 114–220.

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Chapter One

in a Czech translation (TvoĜení v umČní výtvarném).2 Kupka first became aware of Kandinsky’s work through Walter Rummel, in 1913, but found in it merely a confirmation of his own ideas. 3 While the response to Kandinsky’s publication was almost immediate and considerable, and the book has subsequently been explored and considered from numerous points of view, Kupka’s theoretical explorations, then as now, received little attention and have yet to be systematically analyzed. The two publications were developed as the artists were just beginning to work with abstraction; each reflects the personal approach and the theoretical explorations of its author: Kandinsky taking a narrow approach and focusing on the fundamental aspects of the contemporary, and Kupka establishing a broader, more historical point of view. Both artists dealt with questions about the purpose of art, the role of the artist, and the significance of the artistic means, but while Kandinsky restricted himself to contemporary artistic developments, Kupka brought his entire encyclopedic knowledge to bear and charted a historical connection that reached from Antiquity to the present day. The publication of Kandinsky’s German-language treatise (Fig. 1.1) by the Piper–Verlag in Munich at the end of 1911 was accompanied by a shortened adaptation in Russian, “O duchovnom v iskusstve,” which was publically read by Nikolai Kulbin at the Second All-Russian Artists’ Congress in St. Petersburg in 1911. 4 The treatise is written in a very personal, almost messianic style, but offers a largely systematic and clearly structured discourse on Kandinsky’s search for adequate artistic means to create an art appropriate to the dawn of “the epoch of the great 2

František Kupka, Tvoreni V Umeni Vytvarnem (Prague: S.V.U. Manes, 1923; Reprint, Prague: Brody, 1999). French edition: F. Kupka, La Création Dans Les Arts Plastiques (Paris: Diagonales, 1989). German edition: Noemi Smolik (ed.), František Kupka. Die Schöpfung in der bildenden Kunst (Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1990). Non-distributed English translation: František Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts (Liverpool: Artists Bookworks, Liverpool University Press, 1997). 3 Meda Mladek, “Biography,” in Frank Kupka, exh. cat. (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981), 110. 4 V. Kandinsky, “O dukhovnom v iskusstve” [On the Spiritual in Art], in Trudy vserossiskogo s''ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde, dek. 1911–ianv. 1912 [Works of the all-Russian artists’ congress in Petrograd, Dec. 1911–Jan. 1912] (St. Petersburg: Akademiia Khudozhestv, 1911), 1: 47–76. See also John E. Bowlt, “Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” in The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art. A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art,” eds. John E. Bowlt and RoseCarol Washton Long, 2nd ed. (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1984), 1–41.

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spiritual.” 5 It is divided into a general section that deals with the contemporary artistic-spiritual situation and a section devoted to painting, in which he addresses the capabilities inherent in the painterly means of color and form. The chapter headings are illustrated with his own woodcuts and the text is supplemented by several visual comparisons from art history as well as three reproductions of his new, abstract works: Impression No. 4, Improvisation No. 18, and Composition No. 2. Kandinsky’s writings distilled the modernist Zeitgeist, and his book soon became an essential guide for the European avant-garde and also Alfred Stieglitz and his group in New York.6

Figure 1.1. Cover of Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1912).

5

Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 99; Lindsay/Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 219. 6 On the influence of his theory, see, for example, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 137–151; Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme & Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-garde, 1912–1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1992).

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Figure 1.2. Cover of František Kupka, TvoĜení v umČní výtvarném (Prague: S.V.U. Manes, 1923).

Kupka’s treatise (Fig. 1.2), in its construction and form, resembles Kandinsky’s. It is subdivided into seven thematic chapters, each illustrated with a woodcut by the author and containing historic visual examples; the illustrations range from the natural sciences to human perception and color theory. Kupka’s work, however, was not published until more than a decade later, by Mánes in Prague, and as a result of its delay and then appearance in a Czech edition accessible to only a limited number of readers, its impact was minimal. Ludmila Vachtová, maintaining that the essential structure of the text was already complete early on, believes that had Creation in the Visual Arts been published in 1912, it would have received the attention it deserved, analogous to Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art. 7 Unlike Kandinsky, however, Kupka’s writing is fairly 7

Ludmila Vachtová, cited in Mela Mladek, “Einige Anmerkungen zum Entstehen des Buches ‘Die Schöpfung in der bildenden Kunst’ von František Kupka” [A few

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circuitous in nature and uneven in both structure and style. The treatise, Kupka wrote, was “written in a period during which I myself was still trying to find the light, thus much of that which is expressed is incomplete, but still it was expressed—which should serve to vindicate me.” 8 Furthermore, as Kupka himself remarked, it lacks a personal or emotional dimension—possibly because the more lively sections were omitted during revisions in the early 1920s.9 Despite differences in presentation and reception of the two treatises, there are a number of commonalities and parallels to be found. Both authors developed their ideas independently of Cubism, which they considered to be not only a typically French nationalist form of expression but also limited in its artistic and innovative possibilities. Kandinsky wrote that the work of Matisse and Picasso offered “two great indications of a great goal”—Matisse represented the focus on color and Picasso on form.10 Kandinsky was convinced that the most expressive artistic form was to be found not in the “clear, ‘geometric’ construction, that is immediately noticeable and rich in possibilities and expressiveness, but [rather in the] inscrutable one, which inadvertently lifts itself beyond the painting, and which, therefore, is meant less for the eye than for the soul.”11 Kupka likewise viewed Cubism as an interesting, new form of artistic expression, but one, however, that did not represent a qualitative difference to that which preceded it: The experiments carried out by Picasso and Braque in the first years of the twentieth century are interesting as attempts to approach nature in a different way to the painters of the past. But they succeed only in offering one more interpretation. The idea of the equivalence they aim at is itself better expressed—with greater mathematical precision—in the diagrams used to illustrate geometrical treatises.12

comments on the emergence of the book “Creation in the Plastic Arts” by František Kupka], in František Kukpa. Die Schöpfung in der bildenden Kunst [František Kukpa: Creation in the Plastic Arts], ed. Noemi Smolik (Ostfildern– Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 161. 8 Mladek, “Einige Anmerkungen zum Entstehen des Buches ‘Die Schöpfung in der bildenden Kunst’,” 160. 9 Ibid., 159. 10 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 32–33. 11 Ibid., 89–90. 12 Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 124.

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In 1896, Kandinsky turned down a teaching position at the University of Dorpat and instead went to Munich, with the intention of devoting himself to painting; the same year Kupka settled in Paris. It was during this time, in the period leading up to the First World War, that both artists found their way from Symbolism to abstraction and formulated their artistic credos. Their theoretical writings reflect and chart this shift, from a mystical Symbolist orientation towards a more scientific basis and a recognition of the importance of psychophysiological factors in the processes of artistic creation and visual perception. Searching for new ways to relate subjective experience and objective reality, the two artists both delved into theories on the sensory perception of color, form, and sound in contemporary physiology and psychology, including Gustav Theodor Fechner’s psychophysics, Wilhelm Wundt’s psychophysiological parallelism, and Ernst Mach’s analysis of sensations.

František Kupka: “Physiology and biology will become a compulsory grammar for all artists” Born in Opoþno in eastern Bohemia in 1871, Kupka, at a young age, was apprenticed to a saddler who initiated him into the practice of spiritism, which later allowed him to earn a living while studying art in Prague and Vienna. In 1893, while still in Vienna, Kupka was introduced to theosophy by a fellow student; he joined a theosophist brotherhood and also became a disciple of the “idea painter” and “kohlrabi apostle,” Karl Diefenbach (1851–1915), an eccentric practitioner of Körperkultur (the cult of the body), who argued for a return to nature and promoted a vegetarian diet.13 Kupka’s move from Vienna to Paris, in 1896, marked a shift in his life and work. He left Central Europe with a metaphysical mindset, but soon began to reject mysticism in favor of the observation of the phenomena of modern life and an interest in contemporary scientific and technological achievements, including the electric light bulb, the moving picture, chrono-photograpy, and X–rays. 14 In early 1897, he wrote to his friend Arthur Roessler: 13 Meda Mladek, “Central European Influences,” in František Kupka 1871–1957. A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1975), 13–37. 14 Rowell, “František Kupka,” 47–80; Virginia Spate, “‘L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même’: spiritisme, anarchisme et érotisme dans l’œuvre de Kupka,” in František Kupka 1871–1957 ou l’invention d’une abstraction, exh.

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The Viennese air is not good for a painter. . . . It was pure decadence. Here [in Paris], once again I take pleasure in the warmth and light of life. I am cured of my ills and wish to return to my studies of nature. . . . 15 I have lost the capacity to think; what remains are my sense perceptions. I would like to stop thinking altogether . . . so that I needn’t adapt myself to endless metaphysics for no good reason. Even though I still have an impression of alienation from this world, and I still have visions, which seem very real, I am working with all my strength to get out of the transcendental labyrinth, and to limit myself to my sense organs . . . I am mentally intoxicated by the Parisian air which forces one to be very pragmatic and leads one away from introspection.16

In 1904, Kupka accepted an offer to illustrate the six–volume L’Homme et la terre (Mankind and the Earth), a comprehensive history of humanity from antiquity to the present by the French geographer and wellknown anarchist Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). 17 In the course of his illustrations for Reclus’s publication (1904–1908), Kupka dealt intensively not only with the subjects of geography, archaeology, and ancient history, but also the natural sciences. He delved into problems in mechanics and optics, attended lectures on physiology in the Sorbonne, and worked in the biology laboratory there.18 The greater emphasis on the natural sciences was to become typical of Kupka’s mindset from 1905 onward. The conclusions Kupka drew from his engagement with the contemporary sciences and his attempts to reconcile the findings of modern science with his own aesthetic considerations can be traced in Creation in the Visual Arts. They are, however, manifold and often contradictory. Believing that “physiology and biology will become a cat. (Paris: Paris Musées, 1989), 15–23; Linda Henderson, “Kupka, les rayons X et le monde des ondes électromagnétiques,” in ibid., 51–57. 15 František Kukpa, letter to Arthur Roessler, March 10, 1897, Collection Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Vienna. English in Serge Fauchereau, Kupka (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 9. 16 František Kukpa, letter to Arthur Roessler, February 7, 1897, Collection Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Vienna. English in Rowell, “František Kupka,” 48. 17 Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre [Mankind and the Earth], 6 vols. (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905–1908). The first five volumes were published in 1905, the sixth volume followed in 1908. See also M.-P. Salé, “Reclus et Kupka: ‘L’homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même’,” in Vers des temps nouveaux Kupka œuvres graphiques 1894–1912, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2002), 100–129. 18 Ludmila Vachtová, “The Other Reality with a Claim to Universality,” in František Kupka: The Other Reality (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1995), 15.

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compulsory grammar for all artists,”19 he recommended that young artists attend courses at the Polytechnic and the School of Medicine as part of their basic training, 20 yet insisted that “artists . . . will never represent nature with the objectivity of scientists.”21 Kupka acknowledged scientific knowledge as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, and scientific positivism provided him with a method of analyzing the creative process and making it comprehensible,22 but while embracing scientific knowledge, Kupka drew a clear distinction between art and science, insisting that “art moves in the opposite direction from science, which is often an arid attempt to see things as they are.”23 Kupka believed that the tiniest cell and the grandest expanse of the cosmos were bound by the same creative principles; thus, the universal, cosmic movement that he sensed and tried to depict in his works is not only a vision of the “great theatre of nature,”24 but also a metaphor for artistic creation, a part of the overall creative process of nature. Art is thereby closely connected “with the movements and events of the whole cosmos.”25 The hidden laws of spiritual reality that are present in all of nature’s manifestations, he insisted, must be made visible by the artist— not by copying nature, but by creating “another reality.”26 The unification of these two viewpoints, the objective and the subjective, in Kupka’s work becomes particularly evident in a painting such as Le Premier pas (1909).27 The motif of the two overlapping circles, surrounded by a ring of smaller disks and complemented by a large, dark wreath of red on the left, was clearly inspired by Kupka’s interest in 19

Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 192. Ibid., 28. 21 Ibid., 47. 22 Ibid., 1, 27. 23 Kupka, manuscript “Raisons de l’évasion,” c. 1924. English in Pierre Brullé and Marketa Theinhardt, “Painting Despite Everything: František Kupka on Creation in the Plastic Arts,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, ed. Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997), 155. 24 Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 63. 25 Ibid. 26 F. Kupka, “Créer! Question de principle de la peinture,” La Vie des Lettres, July 1921. English as “Creation—the Basic Problem in Painting,” in Frank Kupka: Pioneer of Abstract Art, ed. Ludmila Vachtová (New York, Toronto: McGraw– Hill Book, 1968), 285. 27 On the different stages of the painting, see František Kupka 1871–1957, 118– 119. 20

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astronomy and calls to mind a telescopic photograph of a lunar crater taken in 1881. The large white circle with its veined surface seems to suggest a lunar landscape and the punctuated dark green wreaths, which encircle the smaller disks, add a sense of dynamic rotation. Kupka kept up with the most recent astronomical discoveries through scientific journals and periodicals as well as through frequent visits to the observatory, the Palais de la Découverte, and the museum of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. In 1909, he might have seen a large-scale model of the moon in Uccle, Belgium, where he visited Reclus’s brother Onésime.28 The painting also calls to mind one of his experiences as a medium, which he described in a letter to Arthur Roessler in February 1897: “Yesterday I experienced a state of split consciousness in which I had the impression of viewing the earth from outside. I was in a large empty space and could see the planets silently turning.”29 The relationship that Kupka saw between the objective reality of the natural sciences and the subjective reality expressed in art closely drew on nineteenth-century psychophysiological parallelism, a scientific-philosophical model established by the physicist and nature philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887). In his 1860 book Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics), Fechner proposed a theory of the functional reciprocal connection between body and soul, or more generally, between the physical and psychic world. 30 The term “psychophysics,” which became widely recognized among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physiologists, psychologists, philosophers, and physicists, described research relating physical stimuli to our perception of them and established the philosophical foundations of the field. Fechner held that physical and psychological phenomena do not share a causal relationship, but are the result of differing perspectives on reality. Referring to Leibniz’s famous clock analogy, in which the philosopher viewed body and soul as two different clocks mounted on the same board and set to the same time by their creator, Fechner, in contrast, saw body and soul as a single clock being viewed from two different perspectives.31 28

Rowell, “František Kupka,” 78. František Kupka, letter to Arthur Roessler, February 7, 1897. Collection Wiener Stadtbibliothek, Vienna. English in Jaroslav AndČl, “A Wanderer between Chaos and Order,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, ed. Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997), 87. 30 Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik [Elements of Psychophysics] (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860), 8. 31 Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 5. 29

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One provided a view of the clock’s exterior, the other of the clock’s internal workings. Thus, the psychic related to the first-person perspective and the physical to that which is seen from a third-person point of view.32 The external viewpoint, Fechner maintained, corresponded to that of the natural sciences and the internal one to that of the humanities. A complete theory of the interrelation of body and soul would thus have to encompass both.33 Fechner called his approach to the body–soul problem the “identity view” (Identitätsansicht) and attempted to prove by induction that this two-sided approach (Zweiseitenlehre) not only applies to humans, but also to the universe as a whole. Fechner’s work formed the early basis for psychology as a science. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), the founder of experimental psychology, built upon Fechner’s work and introduced the term “psychophysiological parallelism” (psychophysischer Parallelismus). Wundt agreed with Fechner that psychology was situated somewhere between the natural sciences and the humanities. 34 In his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Basic Tenets of Physiological Psychology) of 1874, he established this new field of research and characterized its task as an investigation of those life processes which, standing in the middle between outer and inner experience, demand the simultaneous application of both the outer and the inner methods of observation and, from the perspective of the viewpoints derived from this approach, throw light onto the totality of the life processes and in this way, wherever possible, reveal an overall concept of human being.35

Fechner’s and Wundt’s approaches proved to be crucial to investigations into the psychophysiology of sensory perception by the BohemianAustrian physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach (1838–1916). In his 1886 book, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen (The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical), he wrote: We may thus establish a guiding principle for the investigation of sensations. This may be termed the principle of the complete parallelism of 32

Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 5. Ibid., 6. 34 Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie [Basic Tenets of Physiological Psychology], 4th ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1893), 1: 3. 35 Ibid., 1: 2. 33

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the psychical and physical. According to our fundamental conception, which recognizes no gulf between the two provinces (the psychical and the physical), this principle is almost a matter of course; but we may also enunciate it, as I did years ago, without the help of this fundamental conception, as a heuristic principle of research.36

Drawing on Fechner’s idea that physical and psychological phenomena are not connected by any sort of causal relationship, but instead represent differing perspectives on one and the same reality, Kupka formulated his own argument as follows: There can be no direct relationship between the activity of the artist’s cerebral mass and objective nature. Everything depends, in the first place, on the combination of impressions received, a process which entails the association and coordination of sense data. It follows that the artist—and therefore art—can only evolve, progress, make his way towards clarity, by submitting the subjective ideas he elaborates to a process of sorting which is increasingly strict and comprehensive.37

Kupka saw the work of art as an organism arising from the process of creation, a process that is conditioned by subjective and objective factors. The creative process, he wrote, requires the involvement of all of the human senses, indeed, the whole body, in a union of psychophysiological processes and chemical reactions, coordinated by the human brain.38 The work of art thus embodies a constant dialogue between intuition and reason and between intellect and instinct; whereby, it is intuition that is the actual driving force of the creative process.39 In order for the work of art to address the viewers’ senses as well as their intellects, the artist must particularly concentrate on the interrelationship between his vision and the artistic means by which to convey it.40 “Great art,” Kupka insisted, “[consisted in] making the invisible and intangible, that which is purely and simply felt, into a visible and tangible reality—a reality which is not simple replica in image form of the ideal 36

Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältniss des Physischen zum Psychischen [The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical], 2nd ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1900), 46. English in Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959), 60. 37 Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 171. 38 Ibid., 159–160. 39 Vachtová, “The Stigma of the Outsider,” 88–89. 40 Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 171.

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mechanism common to all, but which, as a created work, has a soul and a life of its own and imposes itself masterfully on the spectator’s senses.”41 Kupka thus views the work of art, so to speak, as a living organism with a soul and ideally capable of directly affecting the observer’s senses: “Art expresses itself by constructing its own organism. The work of art possesses a specific organic structure quite different to what is found in nature.”42 Convinced that the hidden laws of a spiritual reality are present in all manifestations of nature, he insisted that the artist must reveal these connections in his work—by “transforming natural phenomena into ‘another reality’.” 43 Kandinsky, too, took the artist’s calling to make visible the universal forces and hidden laws of nature as a starting point.

Wassily Kandinsky: “Art is an ever advancing expression of the eternally objective in the temporary subjective” Born into a family of successful tea traders in Moscow in 1866, Kandinsky grew up in Odessa. He studied law and economics at Moscow University, and, in 1889, while still a student, participated in a scientific expedition in the region of Wologda for the purpose of gathering information about the legal system of the Zyrians and their religious customs.44 The everyday life of this Finno-Ugric tribe fascinated him, as did the colorful Russian folk art; 45 among his further formative experiences one finds Claude Monet’s painting Heuhaufen (1891), which he saw in an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow, as well as an inspirational performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin.46 Kandinsky served briefly as a lecturer at Moscow University and after turning down a teaching position at the University of Dorpat, in 1896, he moved to Munich, where he first studied at the private art school of Anton 41

Kupka, Creation in the Plastic Arts, 170. Ibid., 45. 43 Kupka, “Creation—the Basic Problem in Painting,” 285. 44 Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–32. 45 Eva Mazur–Keblowski, Apokalypse als Hoffnung. Die russischen Aspekte der Kunst und Kunsttheorie Vasilij Kandinskijs vor 1914 [Apocalypses as hope: The Russian aspects in the art and art theory of Vasily Kandinsky before 1914] (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2000). 46 Wassily Kandinsky, “Rückblicke” [Reminiscences], 1913, in Kandinsky, 1901– 1913 (Berlin, Der Sturm, 1913). English in Lindsay/Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 363. 42

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Ažbe and later under Franz von Stuck at the Munich Art Academy. He was one of the founders of the art group and art school Phalanx, became a member of the New Artists’ Association Munich, and co-founded the Blaue Reiter group in 1911. Kandinsky’s developmental path to abstraction was closely related to his rejection of materialism: The purpose of art was to free humanity from a materialist viewpoint and to prepare it for the arrival of “the epoch of the great spiritual.” 47 In his essay “Rückblicke” (Reminiscences, 1913), Kandinsky explains the existential crisis that drew him to art: A scientific event removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial. I would not have been surprised had a stone dissolved into thin air before my eyes and become invisible. Science seemed destroyed: its most important basis was only an illusion, an error of the learned, . . .48

Kandinsky found further confirmation of this proposition, that matter does not exist and the substance of reality is nonmaterial, in the occult literature and theosophical writings to which he was exposed.49 As Sixten Ringbom and other authors have shown, Kandinsky’s theoretical writings between 1908 and 1912 were deeply influenced by the occult sciences, particularly the theosophical writings of Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Charles W. Leadbeater, but also Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. 50 Stimulated by the theosophists’ belief that analogous to the physical, material world there exists a parallel, spiritual world, Kandinsky became preoccupied with forms of parallel representation. 51 In the course of developing these ideas and relating the material-objective to the spiritual 47

Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 99. Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Lindsay/Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 364. 49 Reinhard Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Wassily Kandinsky [The art theory of Wassily Kandinsky], 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2002), 1: 294. 50 See Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1970), --, “Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pioneers,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, ed. Maurice Tuchmann and Judi Freeman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, New York: Abbeville, 1986), 131–153. Washton Long, Kandinsky, 13–41; Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Wassily Kandinsky, 1: 455–460. 51 Ringbom, “Transcending the Visible,” 139. 48

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abstract elements in his paintings, Kandinsky began to gradually move away from the objective image. Like Kupka, Kandinsky thus came to conclude that the true purpose of art is to promote the spiritual dimension of life. Art and soul were bound together in a complementary relationship of mutual perfectibility; the purpose of the painting was not to create “some vague projection into space,” but rather to “serve . . . the refinement of the soul.” 52 The development of a work of art proceeded in an obscure and even puzzling way until, at some point, it has acquired a life of its own and “becomes an entity, an independent spiritual life, which as a being, leads the life of material realism. . . . It lives, has power, and actively forms the abovementioned spiritual atmosphere.”53 In his art theory, Kandinsky identified three mystical “necessities”— the essential elements comprising a work of art: the “element of [the artist’s] personality,” the “element of style [that is derived from] the message of the epoch and the language of the nation,” and the “element of pure, eternal art, which is constant among all people, nations, . . . and every epoch, as the main element of art, irrespective of time and space.”54 Kandinsky saw in the development of art a gradual distillation of the objective (the pure–eternal–artistic) from the subjective (personality, nation, epoch): “In short, the working of the inner necessity and, therefore, the development of art is an ever advancing expression of the eternally objective in the temporary subjective. On the other hand, it is also fighting the subjective through the objective.”55 The association of the external world and inner reality occurred by means of “vibrations” or resonances. 56 Such formative forces, existing beyond the form of the material world, equally permeate both nature and soul. Kandinsky distinguished between: 1) “nerve vibrations,” purely bodily responses of a base sort that characterize basic emotions or unrefined feelings and sensations, e.g., sad or happy; and 2) “soul vibrations,” subtle nonbodily sensations that “cannot be described with words.”57 The second, higher class of vibrations are the subject of art and

52

Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 93. Ibid., 91. 54 Ibid., 55. 55 Ibid., 57. 56 Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Wassily Kandinsky, 1: 334–345. 57 Ibid., 478. 53

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include, for example, the colors that “generate subtle vibrations of the soul.”58 Such resonances also underlie the communication that arises between artist and observer of a work or art: colors, shapes, tones, words—all are capable of triggering resonances within the soul of the observer, independent of the sensory perception process. Color, in particular, wrote Kandinsky, possesses a particular force and psychic impact: “. . . the psychic power of color takes hold, causing an emotional vibration. Thus, the first physical elementary force develops the channel, through which the deep, inner emotion reaches the soul.” 59 Here, it is evident that Kandinsky was also indebted to Wundt’s model of psychophysiological parallelism; he distinguished between the “pure physical effect” of color and its “psychic effect” leading to “resonances within the soul” (Seelenvibrationen). The initial elementary physical force becomes the pathway by which emotions aroused by color reach the soul.60 Kandinsky characterized the artist as “the hand which, by touching the various keys (= form), causes the human soul to respond to certain vibrations.”61 The creative process begins as a resonance within the soul of the artist, an “inner sound,” that is then expressed as a feeling or thought leading to an appropriate artistic representation by means of the artist’s perception—a process that fulfills the transition from objective to nonobjective art. Kandinsky was not alone among the pioneers of abstract art, including Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and, of course, Kupka, in his belief that the work of art is a reflection of the current stage in the spiritual development of humanity; he saw the work of art as a unification of inner being, i.e., the artist’s soul, and outer form, i.e., the material expression of the abstract content. He concluded that “Art” while immutably resolute and without end, is nonetheless always recasting and redistilling its form: [As] the spirit endlessly strives to refine and thus divest itself of the materiality of the soul, so, too, the means of art must be “refined”. . . . [Art] must lead the spiritual evolution by means of its endless and ongoing “refinements” of form and its prophetic direction.62

58

Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Wassily Kandinsky, 1: 478. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 41. 60 Ibid., 39–41. 61 Ibid., 47. 62 Vasilij Kandinskij, “Soderzhanie i forma” [Content and form], in V. Izdebskij, Salon 2 (Odessa 1910–11), 15. 59

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With the outbreak of the First World War, Kandinsky was forced to leave Germany and eventually returned to Moscow, where he devoted most of his time to the creation of a systematic science of art. The seven years that he spent in Russia up to his re-return to Germany in 1921 were characterized by a greater turn to empirical science and experimental research methods. In May 1920, the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) was established as an interdisciplinary, theoretically oriented and government-sponsored research center, and Kandinsky was appointed as its founding director. The main goal of INKhUK was to develop a science “which analytically and synthetically examines the basic features of both the individual arts and Art as a whole.”63 The starting point of these theoretical explorations were analyses not only of the various forms of art, but also their effect on the human psyche.64 The research program Kandinsky designed for the Department of Monumental Art addressed a variety of forms of artistic expression, such as children’s drawings, Russian popular prints (lubki), and African sculpture, as well as folksongs and dance forms. The members of the department also developed a questionnaire in order to empirically examine the reception of specific artworks.65 In contrast to Kandinsky’s focus on “the psychology of artistic creativity and aesthetic perception and the historical, sociological, and anthropological aspects of art,” some members of the department favored an objective analysis on the purely “theoretical study of the basic elements of a work of art.” 66 The incompatibility of Kandinsky’s focus on the interrelation of art and psychology and Alexander Rodchenko’s concept of the artist as an engineer eventually led to Kandinsky’s resignation. 67 63

Vasilij Kandinskij, “Schematisches Arbeitsprogramm des Instituts nach dem Plan von V. V. Kandinskij, 1920” [Schematic work program of the institute according to V.V. Kandinskij’s plan, 1920], in Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischem Realismus. Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917–1934 [Between revolutionary art and Socialist Realism: Documents and commentaries. Art debates in the Soviet Union, 1917–1934], ed. Hubertus Gaßner and Eckhard Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 106. 64 Kandinskij, “Schematisches Arbeitsprogramm des Instituts nach dem Plan von V. V. Kandinskij, 1920,” 106. 65 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 28–30. 66 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 82. 67 Margarita Tupitsyn, ed., Gegen Kandinsky/Against Kandinsky, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 26.

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However, he continued his research at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAChN, later GAChN)—an institution which had been founded to promote transdisciplinary research in order to integrate science and art through experimental, historical, and theoretical projects.68 Kandinsky was appointed vice president of the Academy and led the Physical– Psychological Department; his research activities included comparative studies of spatial and temporal forms of art (music, dance, painting, architecture) and explorations of the psychological foundations of the perception of different art forms. 69 The investigations were based on experimental research conducted in lab settings and focused on the analysis of the neurophysiological foundations of sensory perception. Like Kupka, Kandinsky’s theoretical considerations of and scientific inquiries into art were significantly shaped by German intellectual thought and scientific research, specifically the studies of Konrad Fiedler, Adolf von Hildebrandt, and Wilhelm Worringer in art history, the work of Wilhelm Wundt and the Leipzig School in psychology, and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and others. 70 Although Kandinsky was not able to establish a German section of the RAChN in Berlin in 1921, he was able to further develop his research at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau.

Paving the way for postwar abstraction Throughout the 1920s, Kandinsky and Kupka both continued to move their own work in the direction of a generalized, geometric simplification of form: Kupka expanding his vocabulary of the vertical, with its various refractions and spatial divisions, and Kandinsky transitioning from color68

Karlheinz Barck, “Die Russische Akademie der künstlerischen Wissenschaften als europäischer Inkubationsort für Psychophysik” [The Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences as a European place of incubation for psychophysics], Trajekte, No. 4 (April 2002): 4; Nadia Podzemskaia, “Die Kunsttheorie Wassily Kandinskys und die Anfänge der GAChN” [The art theory of Wassily Kandinsky and the beginnings of GAKhN], in Kunst als Sprache—Sprachen der Kunst. Russische Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie der 1920er Jahre in der europäischen Diskussion [Art as language—languages of art: Russian aesthetics and art theory of the 1920s in the European discussion], ed. Nikolaj Plotnikov (Hamburg: Meiner, 2014), 179– 181. See also Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik [Avant-garde and psychotechnology] (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 77–78. 69 Podzemskaia, “Die Kunsttheorie Wassily Kandinskys,” 181. 70 Barck, “Die Russische Akademie der künstlerischen Wissenschaften als europäischer Inkubationsort für Psychophysik,” 4.

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form compositions to a stronger geometrization. In the 1930s, both were active in the Paris art scene and, as protagonists of abstract art, were also members of the international artists’ association Abstraction–Création (1931–37), a group which saw itself as a counterbalance to Surrealism and was dedicated to the recognition and dissemination of abstract art. 71 During the later decades of his life, Kandinsky enjoyed another productive period of creativity, but Kupka, due to his physical and psychological condition, produced little work during his last three decades. The work of both artists in the 1930s and 1940s, however, paved the way for postwar modernity—Kupka, in his attention to a strict orthogonality, which in its association with minimal geometric forms already made reference to mathematically serial art,72 and Kandinsky, influenced by Surrealism, in his development of a biomorphological language of form derived from his interest in biological motives drawn from natural science publications.73 In the summer of 1939 Kandinsky was able to report with some satisfaction: I feel that my last stand against the Paris assertion that everything in the new art comes from Paris and the “abstract” art from cubism is slowly helping. One hears only too often now “together with” cubism in France there arose the “abstract” art in Germany and my small contribution does not go unmentioned.74

From about 1910 onward, Kandinsky’s dissociation from modern French art, particularly Cubism and Orphism, had been a permanent motif in his self-description. He tirelessly underscored the difference between his own roots and those of west European modernism and insisted that his own path to abstraction represented an autonomous pioneering venture, one untouched by Cubism.75 Kupka, too, vehemently defended himself, in 71

Abstraction–Création, 1931–1936, exh. cat. (Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 1978). 72 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 222–246; Laurence Lyon Blum, “A Language of Verticals,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, ed. Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997), 130– 132. 73 Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Kandinsky and Science: The Introduction of Biological Images in the Paris Period,” in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed. Oliver A.I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 207–226. 74 Wassily Kandinsky, letter to Galka E. Scheyer, June 23–25, 1939, in Isabel Wünsche, Galka E. Scheyer and The Blue Four: Correspondence 1924–1945 (Berne: Benteli, 2006), 289. 75 Georgia Illetschko, Kandinsky und Paris. Die Geschichte einer Beziehung [Kandinsky and Paris: The story of a relationship] (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 76–80.

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his case against inclusion among the Orphists, and expressed his aversion to “anecdotal Cubism” and “illogical futurist tendencies.”76 At the time of Kupka’s death, in the summer of 1957, his work had already come to the attention of Max Bill, who characterized him as the first painter, who in the sense, still valid today, painted the first post-cubist paintings with a strict development of movement and form. At the time, as Robert Delaunay was creating his impressive “Fênetres” and Kandinsky his initial “Improvisations” and abstract “Compositions” in Munich, Kupka was creating his first concrete painting, the “Fuges in Red and Blue” . . . Kupka’s “Plans verticaux” (1912–13) are the first paintings known to us that were built out of the pure relationship of horizontalvertical picture elements.77

František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky each made lasting contributions to European modernism, both in their abstract artistic work as well as their theoretical writings. Both were indebted by turn-of-thecentury intellectual developments and artistic influences; both were obliged to Symbolism and Art Nouveau and allowed themselves to be strongly influenced by the occult sciences and theosophical concepts before turning to abstract painting, and they both eagerly incorporated into their own aesthetic deliberations newly acquired knowledge from the natural sciences. Their personal circumstances and the timing of their emigration to the West were such that their artistic development came relatively late; their work therefore binds them not only to the first and second generations of symbolists at the turn of the century, but also to the young avant-garde artists active in the 1920s and 1930s, thus making them key figures for subsequent generations.

76

Dorothy Kosinski, “Kupka’s Reception: Identity and Otherness,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, eds. Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997), 103. 77 Max Bill, “Frank Kupka zum 75. Geburtstag” [Frank Kupka on his 75th birthday], Werk [Work], 9 (1946): 106–107.

CHAPTER TWO CREATING THE IDEAL: FRANTIŠEK KUPKA’S SOCIAL REFORM 1 AND ANARCHIST ABSTRACTION NAOMI HUME

František Kupka exhibited a strikingly simple canvas at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1912, Amorpha: Fugue In Two Colors.2 (Plate 2.1) The French public and critics were unprepared for this monumental painting. One critic referred to it as a “bizarre and monstrously large geometric figure.”3 But that Kupka had produced this work was equally surprising. The Czech émigré painter, who had arrived in Paris in the 1890s, was better known for his representational illustrations and political caricatures. Kupka had shown coloristically daring works at the Salons in 1910 and 1911, but all of them had representational subject matter. By contrast, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors is an abstract composition in blue, red, white, and black. The black lower left of the canvas appears to recede behind two hovering white circles in the upper right. The black and white seem static relative to the blue and red areas, which seem to surge I’d like to thank the participants at the “100 Years of Abstract Art: Theory and Practice” conference, Jacobs University, Bremen, at the “Growing the Modern” panel for the College Art Association conference, Boston, and at the “Utopia in Abstract Art” panel for the EAM conference “Utopia,” Helsinki, for their insightful comments on this paper. Thanks also to Martha Ward and Reinhold Heller for indispensable comments on an earlier version. 2 Kupka exhibited two abstract canvases at the Salon d’Automne that year, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors and Amorpha: Warm Chromatics. I focus my discussion here around the first of these paintings. 3 Le Gay, “Salon d’Automne,” L’Univers, 1912. Cited in Marketa Theinhardt and Pierre Brullé, “František Kupka’s Salons,” František Kupka, The Road to Amorpha: Kupka’s Salons, 1899–1913 (Prague: National Gallery, 2012), 42.

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upward, arcing across the whole canvas from lower left to upper right. Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors culminates several years of work on Kupka’s part to produce the sensation of dynamism in a static image. In this article, I use the theoretical writings in his book, Creation in the Visual Arts, to show how Kupka’s reformist social and anarchist political views lie behind his artistic goal of graphically conjuring the sensation of motion and the experience of vitality in the minds of his viewers.4 The motivations behind Kupka’s apparently sudden metamorphosis into a radical painter of monumental abstractions have remained enigmatic. Various accounts attribute the transformation to formal influences, from Czech folk art designs to those of progressive French art. His interest in contemporary biology and non-Euclidean geometry has been credited with inspiring particular abstract motifs or the conceptual basis for his abstraction in general. Kupka’s connection to occult circles in Prague and Vienna and his search for a new kind of spirituality have been cited as influences. His intense solitary studies of philosophy in Vienna in the early 1890s have also been credited with furnishing a metaphysical basis for his abstract works. 5 Although many of these factors impacted

4 František Kupka, Création dans les arts plastiques, trans. Erika Abrams (Paris: Editions Cercles d’Art, 1989). Kupka wrote the text for his book between 1907 and 1913. Pierre Brullé and Marketa Theinhardt, “Painting Despite Everything: František Kupka on Creation in the Plastic Arts,” in Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997), 151. The text was first published as TvoĜení v umČní výtvárném, translated from Kupka’s original French manuscript by Vera Urbanová (Prague: Manes, 1923). Abrams compiled the 1989 French version from the Czech translation and from French manuscripts in archives, but the whereabouts of the text on which the 1923 Czech translation was based are unknown. Abrams claims that the Czech translation “grossly misunderstood” sections of the original text. Brullé and Theinhardt, “Painting Despite Everything,” 152. Erika Abrams, “Note explicative,” in Kupka, Création dans les arts plastiques, 267–284. I have quoted from Abrams’s version throughout. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 5 František Kupka, The Road to Amorpha: Kupka’s Salons, 1899–1913 (Prague: National Gallery, 2012); Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction, exh. cat. (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997); Frank Kupka: The Other Reality (Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, 1995); Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Nonfigurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); František Kupka, 1871–1957: A Retrospective (New York: Guggenheim, 1975); Margit Rowell, “Kupka, Duchamp and Marey,” Studio International v.189

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various aspects of Kupka’s work and it is clear that there can be no single reason for the appearance of any of his paintings, I show that the social and political beliefs behind his caricatures and illustrations also lay at the root of his abstract experiments. Kupka was a committed anarchist.6 He subscribed to a belief, following the theories of Pyotr Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus and Jean Grave, in the need for and possibility of bettering society and eradicating the injustices of the modern industrialized world. The term “anarchist” in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century referred to a wide variety of movements and individuals, but Kropotkin, Reclus, and Grave were among the best known anarchist intellectuals, leaders of the kind of anarchism that relied on theory.7 Kupka drew for a number of anarchist journals in the early years of the twentieth century and made hundreds of illustrations for Reclus’s six-volume, 3545–page magnum opus, L’Homme et la terre (1905–1908), immersing himself in the anarchist philosopher and geographer’s ideas in the process.8 (Fig. 2.1) He also made drawings for a number of publications by Pyotr Kropotkin starting in 1909.9 Kropotkin defined anarchism as a “conception of society which is based…on an analysis of tendencies of an evolution that is already going on in society, and on inductions therefrom as to the future.” Anarchism is not utopian, he explained, because that word “implies the idea of something that cannot be realized,” rather, it builds on social forms already in existence.10 Kupka had long believed he could use illustration and caricature to promote social reform. But between about 1904 and 1911, he began to see how anarchist ideas about social forms could be applied to visual forms. Rather than merely depicting the miseries of the present or fantasies of the future, he began to experiment with graphic and coloristic techniques already known to have specific effects upon the viewer’s perception. (January–February 1975);. Ludmila Vachtová, Frank Kupka: Pioneer of Abstract Art, trans. ZdenČk Lederer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968). 6 Virginia Spate, Orphism; Patricia Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 145–176. 7 Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 20. 8 Kupka, “Lives of the Artists,” in Kupka, The Road to Amorpha, 126. Kupka made illustrations for the anarchist journals L’Assiette au Beurre, Les temps nouveaux, La Cravache, Le Combat and others. Leighten, note 11, 200. 9 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 41 and note 11, 287–288. 10 Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” (1901) in The Essential Kropotkin (New York: Liveright, 1975), 66. Emphasis original.

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Figure 2.1. IIllustration for fascicle coverr, Elisée Recluus, L’Homme et e la terre (1905–1908).. University of Chicago C Librarry.

Kupka bbelieved that the t artist cann not simply reppresent an ideeal for his viewer, but must create in i the viewer’s mind an exp xperience of th he artist’s ideal vision.. He lamentedd, “if only pain nters and scullptors would attempt a to do as naturee does . . . to penetrate p beyo ond the surfacee.”11 He thoug ght artists should havee ambitions too “engender . . . a life com mparable to th hat which animates suurfaces clothhed in the multiple m viciissitudes of chemical assimilationn, of blood whhich circulatess in veins.”12 K Kupka emphaasized the difference between creatioon and representation in artt and asserted that only the former can fulfill the t proper goal g of art, which is to promote humanity’s ideals.13 Whaat I would like to emphasizze here is how Kupka brought his commitment to Central Eu uropean approoaches to social reform together witth the anarchiist theories he encounteredd in Paris. Hee thought his abstract paintings coould play upo on known phhysiological effects e of 11

Kupka, Crééation, 117. Ibid. 13 Ibid., 39. 12

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perception to lead viewers to experience the ideal vitality and joy that were the aim of both social reform and anarchist theory. As I will show, Kupka’s writings and abstract paintings follow the tenets of Reclus and Kropotkin, espousing no utopian projection into the future, but finding the structure of harmony in the present, as exemplified in the organic processes of nature. Kupka believed that he could contribute to the anarchist cause through his own métier as Kropotkin had called for in his well-known “An Appeal to the Young” (1880). Kropotkin exhorted artists to “place your pen, your pencil, your chisel, your ideas at the service of the revolution.” 14 He called on artists to discard realism, as Kupka would later do in his book Creation in the Visual Arts. Kropotkin asked them to depict the “heroic struggles of the people against their oppressors” rather than “describ[ing] minutely” the miseries they saw around them. 15 Insisting on a rigorous scientific method, Kropotkin believed in using nature as a model for envisioning new possibilities in society. In his book, Kupka made use of contemporary developments in physical psychology, anatomy, chemistry, and new theories about how perception works. A running theme was the importance of using natural organic processes as a model for artistic creation. Kupka had previously tried to express his ideal vision through representational paintings. Though Ballad/Joys (1901) seems to have little in common with Amorpha, he described a similar intent for both works. (Plate 2.2) He wrote to a friend that he wanted “to express something of what I felt when I used to sit alone on the sea-shore . . . . The sea-shore and the clouds are humming with some unknown joy . . . I want everyone who sees the picture to experience such feelings.” 16 In the painting, a woman sits on a gray horse, lifting up her blond hair, while a brunette stands on a pony, leaning down to hold onto the mane. Yellow-orange late afternoon sunshine bathes the scene, casting long purple shadows. The figures are not academically idealized and though the work is painted in bright colors with visible brushstrokes, it has none of the spontaneity of an impressionist image. Rather it looks carefully drawn and painted, and studies for the work, including anatomical sketches of the animals, attest 14

Originally published as “Au Jeunes Gens,” Le Révolté, June 25; July 10; August 7, 21. Later published in book form by Les Temps Nouveau, it went through numerous editions. 15 Kropotkin, An Appeal to the Young (New York: Maisel, 1921), 9–10, 12–13. 16 Kupka, letter to Josef Svatopluk Machar, 1902. Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 45, 287. Correspondence in manuscript collection, Národní Muzeum, Prague. Vachtová does not give citations for individual letters.

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to Kupka’s painstaking approach. Two large shadows are cast across the beach before the women, suggesting two tall forms looming up from the water beyond the left frame of the canvas. The painting seems obscurely allegorical, but its message is elusive despite Kupka’s explanation that he wanted viewers to experience joy. He intended this painting to convey the joy that he experienced when alone at the seashore, suggesting that the very corporeal women and horses are meant to function symbolically, as embodiments of his emotion. But it is difficult for the viewer to see the women this way because Kupka gave them such individuality. Each is a portrait of one of Kupka’s lovers and their specificity works against our seeing them as ideal figures in general. They look much more like naked contemporary women on horseback at the beach, a scenario for which it is hard to come up with an appropriate narrative motivation. Perhaps this is why the painting has often been dismissed by scholars as satirical or labeled “repulsive.” 17 Kupka did not want viewers to seek a narrative explanation, but rather to experience joy at the sight of these sunlit playful women. Kupka exhibited Ballad/Joys multiple times, suggesting its importance to him.18 Another work Kupka exhibited more than once was Autumnal Sun (1906), in which he again depicted nude women in intense sunlight.19 By using the traditional poses of the three graces, he conveyed more clearly his intent that these figures function allegorically. Kupka would have seen the bright, eccentric color used by Fauve painters by this time, and he intensified the colors in this work. But the orange sunlight in this painting as in Ballad still offers a naturalistic motivation for his color choices. Kupka does not use exaggerated colors expressively, as Henri Matisse was doing at this time. Yet it is clear that, just as Matisse embodied The Joy of Life (1905–1906) with an Arcadian landscape filled with nude women, for Kupka, nudes illuminated by intense sunlight signified an ideal experience of joy. The women look like the three graces, but the title calls our attention to the sun. Kupka again appears to suggest that we are not to “read” this 17

Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 45. He showed Ballad/Joys at the 1901 Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts and at the St. Louis World Exposition in 1902. 19 He showed Autumnal Sun at the Salon d’Automne in 1906, at the Vienna Secession Kunstschau in 1908, and exhibited an etching of it at the 1910 Salon d’Automne. See Fig. 32, Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski, Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstracition (Ostfildern–Ruit: Verlag Gert Hatje, 1997), 61. 18

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painting for symbolic meaning in a traditional way. Rather, the cast light produces a visceral effect. As in Ballad/Joys, however, it is perhaps as difficult now as it was in 1906 for us to get beyond what seem almost caricatural figures. One critic called the work “Bohemian, awfully German.” 20 Nevertheless, Kupka showed it again two years later in Vienna, where William Ritter objected to the “monstrous flesh of the three . . . Graces,” and declared it “one of the most grotesquely pathetic paintings . . . that the unfettered imagination of today knows how to conceive.”21 However, I believe Kupka intended this painting to produce in the mind and body of the viewer an intensity of positive feeling. Kupka evokes sunlight not just as an incidental means of lighting the subject matter, but as a central theme. The light as well as the nudes in Autumnal Sun and Ballad/Joys carry with them some of the force of utopian vision with which he later wanted to invest his abstract work. In 1908, Kupka made a series of drawings and paintings of another nude figure in sunlight so strong that light becomes the painting’s subject matter as much as the young girl it illuminates. Girl with a Ball depicts Kupka’s seven-year-old stepdaughter, Andrée. 22 Again, here is no generalized, idealized nude, but unlike Ballad/Joys and Autumnal Sun, the figure in Girl with a Ball departs from the academic model in which female nudity signals allegorical ideas or erotic fantasy. Her straightforward and uninhibited nudity and her playfulness connect this depiction of her to contemporary imagery relating sunlight and nudity to health and lifestyle reform movements that signified, in the early years of the twentieth century, progressive ideas about health, the body, and a return to nature to combat the malevolent effects of industrialized society. Lichtgebet, an image of a long-haired, nude young man standing heroically on an outcropping of rock with arms reaching towards the sun, painted by Fidus (Hugo Höppener) in 1890, became so well known in its multiple different versions and in mass reproduction as a postcard, that it became the icon of 20 Le Petit Temps (October 5, 1906). Quoted in Theinhardt and Brullé, “František Kupka’s Salons,” 29. 21 William Ritter, “Correspondance de l’Autriche. Kunstschau,” Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, supplément à la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, no. 28 (August 15, 1908): 289. Quoted in Theinhardt and Brullé, “František Kupka’s Salons,” 29. 22 Kupka, Girl with a Ball, 1908. Oil on canvas, 114 x 70 cm, Musée Nationale d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. See Fig. 48 in Jaroslav AndČl and Dorothy Kosinski, Painting the Universe: František Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction (Ostfildern–Ruit: Gert Hatje, 1997), 117. Two sketches related to this painting are reproduced in Markéta Theinhardt and Pierre Brullé, Kupka: The Road to Amorpha: Kupka’s Salons, 1899–1913 (Prague: National Gallery, 2012), 77.

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the German youth movement.23 Images of nude young people frolicking in sunlit nature proliferated, signaling the different aspects, from health, youth, and beauty, to homeopathy, vegetarianism, and “racial hygiene,” of numerous different reform movements. Kupka’s child has none of the idealized heroic qualities of Fidus’ painting, but her youthful, unabashed nudity has more in common with the iconography of nineteenth-century central European reformist Nacktkultur (nude culture) than with the voluptuous fantasy of Kupka’s earlier nudes. Other variants were called Freikörperkultur (the culture of free bodies) or Lebensreform (reform of life), all different aspects of a movement that had become so pervasive that “in Germany around 1900, the nude human form, drenched in sunlight, gained metaphysical status.”24 Kupka, like many others, layered the ideas of health and freedom over traditional allegorical meanings of the nude as truth or innocence.25 Fidus was the most famous disciple of Karl Diefenbach, a painter and leader of an artistic branch of the lifestyle reform movement in Germany. Kupka was also a disciple of Diefenbach. Before moving to Paris from Vienna in the mid-1890s, Kupka spent time at Diefenbach’s restorative colony for painters in nearby Hüttelsdorf. 26 Kupka’s few months at Diefenbach’s colony solidified his dedication to a regimen of naked exercise outdoors, cold showers, and sun-worship that he would follow throughout his life. Kupka declared these activities to be necessary physical preparation to becoming a great painter. Winter and summer, I follow my morning shower with gymnastics, which I practice nude in my garden. . . . It is . . . a ritual that I perform as a prayer to the great fireworks of the rising sun.27

23 Matthew Jefferies, “Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism?” in Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930: Essays for Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 95–96. See Wolfgang de Bruyn, Fidus, Künstler alles Lichtbaren (Berlin: Schelzky und Jeep, 1998). 24 Reinhold Heller, “Brücke in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913,” Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 27. 25 Heller, Brücke, 28. 26 Franziska Baetcke and Laurence Lyon Blum, “Biographical Notes,” Kupka, Pioneer in Abstraction (Dallas: Gert Hatje, 1997), 21. 27 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 24. Kupka, Création, 136.

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Kupka ddescribed expeeriencing “imp pressions of m magnificent co olor” that he attributedd to this rituual, asserting that they weere “caused by b simple hygienic carre.”28 Girl witth a Ball was not the first iimage in whicch Kupka had evoked his dedicatioon to lifestyle reform. His M Meditation (1899) is a variation onn Fidus’ Lichttgebet, with an a introspectivve, bearded older o man replacing thhe exuberant youth. 29 Kup pka depicts hhimself nude, kneeling with his boody erect andd head bowed d before a paanorama of mountains m surroundingg a lake. In his bbook on the visual v arts, Kupka K wrote specifically about a the health beneffits of exposuure to sunlightt and fresh airr and of exerccising the body in openn spaces. He predicted p that the new geneeration would be raised as he was raaising his steppdaughter And drée, to be unninhibited abo out nudity and to enjooy exercise outdoors, o and the image hhe made for Reclus’s chapter “Eduucation” in L’’Homme et la terre illustrattes this ideal. (Fig. ( 2.2)

Figure 2.2. Illlustration for chapter c “Educaation,” in Eliséee Reclus, L’Ho omme et la terre (1905–11908). University of Chicago Library. L

28

Kupka, Crééation, 136. Kupka, Meeditation: Whenn Mountain and d Valley are O One, 1899. Oil on o canvas, from Kupka, Album, c. 1907. See Fig. 79 in Patricia Leiighten, The Lib beration of A in Avvant-Guerre Paaris (Chicago: University U Painting: Moodernism and Anarchism of Chicago Prress, 2013), 1477. 29

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Kupka believed that children raised in this manner would grow up to have a different kind of perception than people raised behind “the heavy curtains” of traditional bourgeois homes that “keep people and objects in a kind of intimate semi-darkness.” Further, he thought a progressive upbringing would profoundly change what the next generation would need from art and what the artist produces. With “blood flow[ing] again through robust muscles, while brimming with freshness,” artists and viewers alike would rediscover that “the sensation of colors is to be found within” themselves.30 It is well-documented that Girl with a Ball was the starting point for numerous studies that ultimately led to Kupka’s abstract Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors.31 Kupka wanted to find a way to show more directly the dynamism and positive energy that is latent in the representational image of Andrée. As with Ballad/Joys, he wanted to evoke the sensation of positive dynamic potential in the mind of the viewer, but he began to realize that naturalistic representation impeded the viewer’s direct experience. On one of the intermediate drawings Kupka wrote, “As long as there is a difference between the ground colors and the flesh, I will fall once again into photographic postcard imagery.” 32 Kupka wanted to produce equilibrium between figure and ground and to move away from mimetic representation. The blue and red of the child’s ball dominate in the later studies, as movement itself overtook symbolism as Kupka’s goal. From a painting of a young girl inviting the viewer to join her game in the sun, Kupka developed a monumental canvas on which the colors red and blue themselves become the protagonists that dramatize dynamic movement. Kupka’s interests in lifestyle reform and anarchism fueled his experiments with conjuring movement in paint. There were so many different reform movements in Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century that it is difficult to be specific about the issues they promoted. In general, however, they stemmed from a conviction that social reform must start with individual self-improvement. 33 The anarchist theories that 30

Kupka, Création, 142. Anne Swartz, “A Redating of Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors II,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, v. 80, no. 8, October 1993: 327–48. Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 83. Karel Srp, “Kupka’s Defiance,” in Kupka, The Road to Amorpha, 77–80. 32 Quoted in Swartz, “A Redating of Kupka’s Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors II,” 331. 33 Jefferies, “Lebensreform,” 92–93. 31

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attracted Kupka in Paris also stressed the importance of the realization of each individual’s potential. Kropotkin and Reclus believed that society must be modeled on the processes of natural organisms, and that the aims of the groups that human beings form out of social necessity must not take precedence over the desires of the individuals of which they are composed. An anarchist society, wrote Kropotkin, would be organized without government, and would be harmonious not due to submission to authority, but by “agreements concluded between . . . freely constituted [groups].” Such society would never be static, but, like “organic life at large, harmony would . . . result from an ever-changing adjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences.”34 A society organized in this way would allow “man . . . to obtain the full development of all his faculties. . . . He would thus be able to reach full individualization, which is not possible either under the present system of individualism, or under any system of State socialism.” 35 Moving from Vienna to Paris in the mid-1890s, Kupka maintained his reform principles and married them to anarchist theory. Around 1912, Kupka reflected on his development as an artist in a short text, “Study of the Lives of the Painters.” He described how at one point, he was so poor that he “went five days without eating,” until he found a coin. But the woman who sold him a piece of bread deemed the money fake, made a scene and took back the bread. Kupka wrote that this incident was “no mere minor mishap.” “It had a huge impact,” he recalled, “on a young mind overwhelmed by a scene of such social injustice.” His reflection on this incident is political rather than personal. He did not react angrily, or with what he called “the jealous envy of the social proletariat,” but decided he needed to find his own way toward solving social problems. Because he could not yet do that, “at the altar of Art,” he wrote, “I hoped that I would be able to help overcome the ills suffered by society, of which I was myself a victim, through clearly tendentious drawings.”36 The caricatures and illustrations Kupka produced in Paris served a political purpose that he did not yet think he could achieve in painting. Kupka made his most extensive series of illustrations for the anarchist journal L’Assiette au beurre. He was responsible for three issues, in 1902 and 1904, devoted to the themes of Money, Peace, and Religions,

34

Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” first published in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, 1910. Reprinted in The Essential Kropotkin, 108. 35 Ibid., 108–109. Emphasis original. 36 Kupka, “Study of the Lives of the Painters,” 126–127.

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respectively. 37 On the cover of Money, a grotesque figure with a huge round transparent belly filled with gold coins emerges from murky water.38 He places a crown on his head and holds up a tiny overcoated figure in his other hand, oblivious to the small man’s angry fist and to the other small figures crawling out of the blood-reddened water below. Kupka presents Capital in its grotesque naked state, giving itself authority and ignoring the sufferings of powerless workers. Kupka’s drawings for his Religions issue were “so outspokenly opposed to every imaginable creed that even the Assiette editors toned them down.”39 Nevertheless, the drawings mercilessly point to the self-serving nature of religious organizations and the manipulative ends to which the people’s belief is put. Kupka depicts gods of numerous different religions, ending with the goddess of reason, in whose name havoc was wreaked in the French Revolution. The captions describe how each of these gods demand sacrifices of money and lives. Kupka’s issue on Peace brought together themes from the previous two: The mechanisms of money, religion, and war are inextricable. On a stage, on the back page of Peace, a joker figure draws back a curtain to reveal a field covered in gray corpses. Entitled “La seule . . . ” the image summarizes the whole issue by showing that the only real peace is death and all claims otherwise are just theatrical artifices. Kupka’s series for L’Assiette au beurre are the creations of a committed anarchist frustrated about possibilities for social change. Kupka’s correspondence with French anarchist thinker Jean Grave between 1905 and 1908 attests to the painter’s support for the anarchist cause.40 He participated in the 1909 protests in Paris against the execution of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer. 41 Ferrer had arranged for the 37

Elizabeth and Michel Dixmier, L’Assiette au beurre: revue satirique illustrée, 1901–1912 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1974), Stanley Appelbaum, French Satirical Drawings from “L’Assiette au beurre” (New York: Dover, 1978), xi. L’Assiette au beurre also commissioned full issues from Kupka on the themes of Civilization and Liberty, but they were never realized. Painting the Universe, 23. 38 L’Assiette au beurre, no. 41, January 11, 1902. 39 L’Assiette au beurre, no. 162, May 7, 1904. Stanley Appelbaum, French Satirical Drawings from “L’Assiette au beurre”: Selection, translations and text (New York: Dover, 1978), xi. See Figs. 98–99 in Leighten, Painting the Universe. 40 Theda Schapiro, Painters and Politics: The European Avant-Garde and Society, 1900–1925 (New York: Elsevier, 1976), note 28, 280. 41 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 24. Ferrer was court-martialed and executed in Spain on October 13, 1909. Patricia Leighten, Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 109–110. Leighten cites James Joll, The Anarchists (New York, 1966), 236.

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translation of Reclus’s L’Homme et la terre into Spanish by Anselmo Lorenzo, leader of the Spanish labor movement.42 In 1909, Kupka began to contribute to La Grande Révolution, the anarchist journal begun by Kropotkin. Kupka also completed drawings for 68 chapters of Kropotkin’s Revolution in 1909, but ultimately he never completed this work. 43 Starting around 1909, he was also writing his book, Creation in the Visual Arts, and developing the paintings and drawings that lead to Amorpha. In around 1904, Kupka was asked to illustrate Reclus’s L’Homme et la terre. Prior to Reclus’s death in the summer of 1905, he and Kupka discussed in detail the latter’s illustrations for the work, which was published in installments from 1905 through 1908.44 Though they continue to demonstrate Kupka’s political commitments, the illustrations he produced for Reclus’s book display little of the frustrated anger of his Assiette au beurre caricatures.45 Kupka later wrote that he “followed the evolution of man on earth for four years,” by reading Reclus’s book.46 He described this experience as a “blessing” that gave him the historical and geographical education he felt he had missed by leaving school at an early age.47 Reclus’s geographical history was designed for a mass audience and aimed to disseminate his particular anarchist view of world history. He intended his book to demonstrate his belief that “Geography is nothing other than History in space, just as History is Geography in time.”48 Reclus never explicitly discussed anarchism in the book, but his whole enterprise was to elucidate, through history and geography from prehistory to the present day, the tendencies already at work in society’s evolution toward 42

Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism (originally published 1932–1934) (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 229. Ferrer published the book at the press of La Escuela Moderna de Barcelona, the school he had founded to educate the working class. Reclus, El Hombre y la Tierra, trans. Anselmo Lorenzo (Barcelona: Escuela Moderna, 1906–1909). 43 Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 41 and note 11, 287–288. 44 Paul Reclus, “Postface,” to Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, vol. 6 (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1903–1908), 543. Reclus’s nephew, Paul, edited the final volume for publication. Paul Reclus explains that the first 5 volumes were published in serial fascicles during 1905, but the last volume was delayed by Reclus’ death. Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 41. 45 Spate, Orphism, 92. 46 Kupka, “Study of the Lives of the Painters,” 126. 47 Ibid. 48 Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1903–1908), epigraph on cover page.

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the ideal conception that anarchist theorists promoted. In the preface, Reclus summarized his aims: I wanted to study Man in the succession of the ages as I had observed in the diverse regions of the globe, and to establish the sociological conclusions to which I had been led. I sketched the plan of a new book in which were described the conditions of the sun, the climate, the whole environment in which the events of history took place, in which would be demonstrated the relationship between Men and the Earth, where the movements of people would be explained, from cause and effect, by their harmony with the evolution of the planet.49

He concluded the preface with the three “laws” of social geography: class struggle, search for equilibrium, and the sovereign decision of the individual. “It is the observation of the Earth which explains the events of history,” he wrote, “and the latter leads to a deeper study of the planet, towards a more conscious solidarity of our individuality—so small and yet so large—with the immense universe.” 50 Though he discussed the communal goal of class struggle, he foregrounded the rights of the individual. 51 Reclus’s enormous undertaking represents an ambitious attempt to bring his life’s work to a mass audience.52 Reclus’s book was issued in weekly fascicles for wide circulation, and it was enormously popular. 53 Kupka’s cover image, issued with each installment, connects Reclus’s anarchist writings with the iconography of reform movements by featuring a naked man with his back to the viewer. (Fig. 2.1) Rather than facing brilliant sunshine or a mountain landscape, however, this figure contemplates the spherical earth across the vast distance of outer space, embodying Reclus’s ambition in his book to narrate the relationship of human and earth across history from a global perspective. Throughout Reclus’s book, Kupka used nude figures in nature to suggest harmony between humanity and cosmos. Much of the book related to particular historical epochs and for these chapters, Kupka produced precise renderings of men and women in local historical costume. By contrast, the nude figures embody the timeless ideals of

49

Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, i. Ibid., iv. 51 Béatrice Giblin, Introduction to Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1982), 6. 52 Ibid., 6–7. 53 Ibid., 5–6. 50

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anarchist soociety foundedd on the natu ural evolutionnary tendenciies which Reclus’s boook advocated.. A drawiing for Recluus’s preface sh hows dark skkies lit by a stream s of stars, framedd by the family unit. A man on the rightt reaches out to t a child carried by a woman on thhe left, all nak ked. Below thiis ensemble, a bearded man writes w with his left hand h on a glob be and books oon his table. (F Fig. 2.3) With thiss vignette, Kuupka pictures Reclus’s R theorry of the conffluence of the cosmos and the indivvidual, and brings the basicc social relatio onship of the family iinto contact with w the structture of the unniverse. The wise w man represents thhe geographerr-historian wh ho makes thesse connection ns: Reclus himself. Kuupka’s drawiing at the end e of the bbook’s final chapter, “Progress,” shows a nakked family trio o before an oopen field do otted with naked figurees reaching out o to each other or danciing. The famiily in the foreground m merges with the t Earth and the universe w while stars an nd planets seem to orbit the family nucleus, n embo odying the maacro- and miccrocosmic beliefs of booth author andd illustrator.54

Preface” to Elissée Reclus, L’H Homme et la terrre (1905– Figure 2.3. Illlustration for “P 1908). Univerrsity of Chicagoo Library.

54

See Fig. 91 in Leighten, The Th Liberation of Painting, 1677.

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Kupka not only subscribed to Reclus’s political ideas, but appears to have used Reclus’s work in part as a model for his own book. Creation in the Visual Arts lays out Kupka’s observations about the visual arts to “establish the conclusions” about creative work to which he had been led. Kupka avoided the confrontational tone that had been set for artistic declarations by the Futurist and other artistic manifestos. Rather, he explored the history of art’s origins and its development across various cultures, adding to this a scientific explanation of how the physiology of the body impacts both the artist’s and the viewer’s perception. Reclus set out to establish a cause and effect relationship between the environment and human history to argue that a more active sense of human connection to the natural world would lead to social reform. Kupka sought to show how social and physical environments have determined the role art has played in human history. With his physiological explanations of the perceptual apparatus, he argued for a renewal of art’s power and purpose. Kupka explained that he only wanted his book to be “a reliable friend” to people who recognize that art, far more than mere display of beauty, wealth or virtuosity, is “the means by which humanity expresses its ideals.”55 Rather than trying to shock or break with tradition, he tried to persuade the reader that his conception of an abstract art based in nature but not reproducing it was, as Kropotkin wrote of his conception of anarchist society, “derived . . . from an analysis of tendencies that are at work already.”56 The anarchist theories of Kropotkin and Reclus emphasize evolution, growth, and development, and seek to determine the organization of society that would promote the most vitality.57 Kropotkin declared that the aims of anarchism were to discover What forms of social life assure to a given society, and then to mankind generally, the greatest amount of happiness, and hence also the greatest amount of vitality? What forms of social life are most likely to allow this amount of happiness to grow and develop, . . . to become more complete and more varied? . . . The desire to promote evolution in this direction determines the scientific as well as the social and artistic activity of the anarchist.58

55

Kupka, Création, 39. Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” 109. 57 Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” 62–63. 58 Ibid. 56

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Kupka’s urge to evoke a sense of joy directly in his viewers corresponds closely to these goals. Anarchists thought humans could promote well-being while they were evolving toward that better society, and that this would speed them on their way. Reclus believed that “anarchists should work in small ways now to ‘recreate the world in a different pattern’ so that well-being would not have to be postponed entirely until after a revolution.” 59 Natural landscapes and paintings of them, he thought, offer good models for us, as does contemplating beauty in general. Kupka’s insight was that painting should try to convey more directly the organic dynamism that he thought, following anarchist theory, was the most essential aspect of nature. In his book, he explained that copying nature is to falsify it by stilling and deadening it.60 Kupka did not want to make paintings for people to passively contemplate as models for an ideal new world. He thought art could serve the anarchist cause in a more direct way by producing in the viewer a sense of the vitality and joy that anarchist revolution would bring. Along the lines of Kropotkin’s theories, Kupka saw dynamic natural processes as essential to promoting happiness, and we can see that in his abstract paintings, as he turned away from copying nature, he came to magnify and emphasize natural processes themselves in graphic form. While future generations, raised with more progressive ideas about health and the benefits of fresh air, sunlight, and exercise might naturally be more receptive to this kind of image, in the meantime, carefully conceived abstractions could lead the viewer to feelings of well-being rather than merely depicting that state.61 Kupka’s book follows the kind of model Kropotkin called for—based in science, asking what art’s goals should be, and then systematically deducing what forms of art might allow “the greatest amount of happiness, and . . . vitality” to evolve. His book and his visual works show him attempting to “promote evolution in this direction,” as Kropotkin called on the artist to do.62 In his book, Kupka attacked contemporary defenses of naturalistic representation in art, claiming that the path that Western art had followed for centuries was misguided. It never satisfied what Christianity required, he argued, and it did not serve the god of positivism that held sway in his 59 Reclus, Evolution and Revolution (London: William Reeves, 1892), 7. Quoted in Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 102. 60 Kupka, Création, 88. 61 Ibid., 142. 62 Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” 62–63.

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own time. He praised the abstract designs of Islamic art as having “as much if not more spirit than ours.”63 Using form and color, the “invented forms” of Islamic art give “more force to [the] dry ‘abstract ideas’” of a religion that requires one to renounce attachments to the things of this world and that explicitly forbids making images of its god.64 By contrast, images of Christian saints are based upon conventions developed in Greek art to celebrate the vitality of the human body. 65 “Nourished thus by contradictory lessons,” Kupka wrote, “the European spirit hesitate[d] a long time between two roads before finally finding reassurance in scientific positivism.” 66 But Kupka also called attention to the contradictions inherent in contemporary arguments that naturalism in painting was the artistic counterpart to the rationality of modern science. First, science depends on our senses, and our senses deceive us. We think we perceive things directly, “as they are,” but our senses are always affected by memories and experiences as well as by our physiological and mental health. 67 Kupka argued that an artist’s representation cannot recreate the forms of the outside world because our perceptions filter and alter that world. “The means of expression are a function of the manner of seeing and are thus as diverse as they are numerous,” Kupka claimed, and these means “are also determined by the physiological constitution and intelligence of the artist.”68 Further, the world is always in motion, defying the artist’s ability to capture it exactly. Any manual transcription, he claimed, will always leave gaps that must be filled in by the viewer’s imagination, defeating the aim of capturing what the artist sees. Kupka described how difficult it is to “capture a few graphic contours, traced with the speed of lightning.” 69 The artist perceives living, moving nature in successive moments, in which contours and “luminous values” continually shift in relation to the angle of vision, the light of day, and according to the “contraction and dilation of the pupil [which] depend[s] . . . on our physiological state.”70 Kupka argued that only a photograph can accurately capture the facts of the world’s appearance at any given moment in time, so we should leave that kind of work to the mechanical apparatus.71 Not 63

Kupka, Création, 51. Ibid., 56–58. 65 Ibid., 53–56. 66 Ibid., 71. 67 Ibid., 60. 68 Ibid., 76. 69 Ibid., 81. 70 Ibid., 82. 71 Ibid., 80–81. 64

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only is “everything . . . in movement, animated by manifest or latent dynamism,” Kupka observed, but each organism is connected to others and ultimately “to the totality of the forces of nature of which the sun is for us the most important.”72 In his preface, Reclus described the plan for his book, also beginning with “the conditions of the sun,” as the starting point for the cause and effect chain that underlies the harmony of humanity’s and the earth’s evolution. 73 In the course of his argument against representation in art, Kupka arrived at his definition of an ideal art, one that would convey the dynamism of nature whose source is the sun. Kupka’s ultimate goal in his abstract painting was to produce a sense of dynamism in the mind of the viewer: “to give the impression of movement using means that are themselves immobile.” By “playing with different degrees of intensity of evoked impressions,” he wrote, the artist can “simulate a sequence that doesn’t exist.” “A projection, a live spot” he explained, “jump[s] immediately to the eye, but we don’t notice the less intense areas until afterwards.” 74 Kupka’s Family Portrait (1910) demonstrates these ideas.75 A woman lies on a blanket on the grass with her back to us, her body extending across the diagonal of the painting from upper left to lower right. Her dress catches our eye first because of the startling use of blue for the highlights and red for the shadowed areas. In his book, Kupka gave specific instructions to painters as to how to intensify blue colors without diluting them. “To bring out [the intensity of] these colors, the chemical manufacturer and paint stores always display them against a very white background.” He went on to say that a white background also brings out the intensity of cadmium red. 76 Kupka succeeded in producing a remarkably intense red next to a brilliant blue in the painting. We see this blue-red contrast first, especially as it is set off by the blanket’s whites and yellows. Only later do we see the smaller girl in white in the upper left, her face and hair harmonizing with the background, and finally, the dog in the upper right, his colors so coordinated with the colors of the grass as to camouflage him, though he is very clearly delineated. By distributing areas of different color contrast on the painting’s surface, Kupka directs the viewer’s eye around the image, producing a sensation of movement in the viewer’s brain.

72

Kupka, Création, 80. Reclus, L’Homme et la terre, i. 74 Kupka, Création, 198. 75 See Fig. 43 in Leighten, Painting the Universe, 79. 76 Ibid., 152. 73

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Kupka was well-informed about contemporary French color theory, which focused on color as perceived by the viewing subject. MichelEugène Chevreul’s insight was that adjacent colors affect how a particular color is seen, and that complementary colors in particular have the effect of heightening the brilliance of each other when placed in juxtaposition.77 But while he recognized the influence of surrounding colors on our perception of any particular hue, Kupka saw this as only one of countless ways in which our color perception can be affected. Since “vision is a chemical process,” Kupka wrote, what we eat, our intake of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, all impact the brain and thereby perception and even thought itself. 78 Ultimately, Kupka was interested in the physical properties of light insofar as they are transmitted as electrical impulses in the brain to form the viewer’s subjective image of the world. But he cautioned against generalizing this experience: “The study of such phenomena does not conform to general rules. It must be oriented toward the individual sensibility. . . . Everyone has his own unique psychic world, set up along an individually specific course.” 79 Reclus’s geographical studies ultimately aimed at making us more conscious of how we are connected to the universe as individuals and Kupka used physiology to emphasize how singular each individual’s perception is. Kupka had different priorities in his study of color and perception than Chevreul. If Kupka’s aim was to produce a sense of dynamism in the mind of the viewer then it is appropriate that the only diagrams of color complements in his book, two disks from Newton’s Optics (1704), are ones that presume the action of movement to make any sense. Newton’s disks were a way of demonstrating the additive properties of pigments: that a mixture of all the colors of the spectrum produces white.80 Kupka explored how color could produce the sensation of movement on a still canvas in his series, Newton’s Disks (1911). The paintings are considered studies for Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors. One version explodes with color, with a saturated red circle near the center of the composition. (Plate 2.3) The color contrasts make this central area jump out against the dark blue, gray, and black hues of the right and lower edges of the painting. The colors are clearly delineated in certain areas, and blur together in others. 77 Robyn Roslak, “The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science, and Anarchism,” Art Bulletin, Sept. 1991, vol. LXXIII, no. 3: 382. 78 Kupka, Création, 130. 79 Ibid., 127. 80 Dennis Sepper, Newton’s Optical Writings: A Guided Study (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 102–107.

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Following the theory that Newton’s disks illustrate, the viewer should see the primary colors as static areas, secondary colors as denoting movement, and white as indicating a mixture of the whole spectrum produced by spinning the disk very fast. Hence the central red area would indicate a still area, while the blurred arc of pink, eventually moving into yellows and whites in the upper left, would indicate accelerating motion. Kupka wrote: “We know that the curve itself seems to move, an illusion which can be reinforced by using graphic structures.” 81 In Disks of Newton, motion is implied both by the arc and by color itself. Rather than depicting Andrée’s red and blue ball at a single point in its trajectory through the air, in Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors, Kupka produced for the viewer the sensation of motion through the dynamism of curves described in red and blue. But the painting is not merely diagrammatic. The rough surface and messy edges throughout are surprising, given the precision of the painting’s design. The coarsely applied paint of the white disks merges roughly with the black background, producing uneven edges. The apparently solid areas of red and blue have what looks like thick and uneven white paint underneath. Except in the sections of solid black, brush strokes are highly visible. Yet each of these aspects of the painting demonstrates a principle that Kupka described in his book. As mentioned above, Kupka deliberately intensified red and blue pigments by painting them over a white ground.82 And he calls attention to the manual work of the painter by changing the amount or thickness of this white, modulating the intensity of the red and blue on top. Signs of the painter’s hand, Kupka wrote, give a painting the “psychic patina” that we prize in craft, that allows us to “intimately penetrate the artisan’s thought.”83 Similarly, when “one wants to surround oneself with art,” Kupka asserted, this is not a desire for copies of landscapes or theoretical diagrams, but rather for the “materialized thoughts and rhythms” of an artist’s subjective vision. 84 Traces of the painter’s handwork allow us access to this vision. The content of that vision, “the objective reality of the work,” he wrote, “depends less on captured resemblances or on any figurative subject than on its ability to produce impressions within the viewer.” 85 And Kupka advocated using “simple optical illusion, without objective foundation beyond our perception,” to intensify this effect. The painter should “resort 81

Kupka, Création, 197–199. Ibid., 152. 83 Ibid., 88. 84 Ibid., 91. 85 Ibid., 146. 82

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to artifices anywhere the color lacks life.86 To produce the sensation of movement in a work of art, Kupka argued, the painter should use color and graphic forms that give “at least an optical illusion [of movement]—a perfectly admissible thing, after all, for three quarters of the fine arts are nothing else” than illusion. 87 But he warned against confusing illusion with “stupidly descriptive trompe l’oeil.” 88 Kupka designed Amorpha carefully to produce the illusion of movement and executed it roughly to give the viewer a sense of connection to the artist’s vision. Ultimately, Kupka argued, works of visual art “have been at all times, primordially, a means of communicating feelings and thoughts.” One day, he predicted, “artists may succeed in making the viewer a witness to the rich life of their subjective worlds without being constrained by the laborious task entailed in making a painting or a sculpture. The viewer, for his part, will no longer need to make his eyes work, understanding having occurred without any material mediation.”89 Kupka believed representation and narrative are superfluous in painting and that perhaps in future an artwork’s physical form would also become obsolete. In the meantime, Kupka developed Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors so that “everyone who sees the picture [could] experience such feelings of joy” as he had tried to convey at the turn of the century with Ballad/Joys.90 But instead of depicting a beach scene that only shows the viewer where the artist was when he experienced a particular feeling, Kupka developed a graphic vocabulary that, he believed, when transmitted via the retina to the viewer’s cerebral cortex, would produce a sensation of brilliance, harmony, and vitality that the viewer could experience directly. Amorpha serves, as Reclus and Kropotkin demanded, as a model of the natural dynamism that will “recreate the world in a different pattern” to promote society’s evolution toward happiness and vitality. 91 Furthermore, Amorpha’s graphic and color qualities, the composition and paint handling, embody Kupka’s theory that in painting he could offer the viewer a direct experience of the processes that lead to order and harmony.

86

Kupka, Création, 153. Ibid., 198. 88 Ibid., note to page 198. 89 Ibid., 229. 90 Kupka, Letter to Machar, 1902, cited in Vachtová, Frank Kupka, 13–14. 91 Reclus, Evolution and Revolution, quoted in Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism, 102. Kropotkin, “Modern Science and Anarchism,” 62–63. 87

CHAPTER THREE KANDINSKY, ANARCHISM, AND THE NARRATIVE OF MODERNISM ROSE-CAROL WASHTON LONG

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially with the 1984 English translation of Peter Bürger’s book Theory of the Avant-Garde reiterating many of the comments of the Marxist historian Georg Lukács from the 1930s, a number of art historians have considered the works of pioneering abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky and other members of the Blaue Reiter group too hermetic and not sufficiently anti-institutional to be politically relevant or effective.1 The concept of “avant-guard” as a political vanguard would no longer be awarded to the Blaue Reiter as it had been earlier. To counter this argument, I plan to focus on Kandinsky’s large 1911 oil Composition V (Plate 3.1), which was exhibited in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich, and reproduced in black and white in the 1

Although Jochen Schulte–Sasse, who wrote the introduction to Bürger’s wellknown book, emphasized that Bürger was qualifying Lukþas, Bürger continued the Hungarian’s over-simplified critique of Expressionism and abstraction as aestheticizing; see “Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the AvantGarde,” in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxxiii–iv. For reflections of some of these concepts in treatments of Kandinsky, see Richard Sheppard, who characterized Kandinsky’s work as representing conservative longings for the past, “Kandinsky’s œuvre 1900–1914: The avant-garde as rear-guard,” in Word & Image, 6, no. 1 (January–March 1990), 42. The title of Margarita Tupitsyn’s Gegen Kandinsky/Against Kandinsky (Munich: Villa Stuck/Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006) reflects her view of Kandinsky’s abstraction as dream-like and removed from the material, concrete world especially when compared to Soviet artists such as Rodchenko, see 33–34/142. Valery Turchin, Kandinsky in Russia (Moscow: Society of Admirers of the Art of Wassily Kandinsky, 2005), also does not believe that Kandinsky was “political.”

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Blaue Reiter Almanac to clarify how early twentieth century anarchist concepts as well as the now quite accepted Symbolist and Theosophical cross-currents prevalent in the years before World War I, lent support to Kandinky’s goal to arouse the complacent. Composition V, 190 x 275 cm, is one of three oils completed before World War I that are of a size taller and wider than any one person.2 Its musically derived title and number as well as its contrasting veils of bright and dark color applied with brushstrokes of varying density produce a seemingly abstract and chaotic work. Kandinsky was not adverse to referring to these first impressions as having an “anarchistic” or a seemingly random or inconsistent order,3 but he also emphasized that the apparent jumble of contrasts opened “the way for further revelations.”4 Just as he explained that the term anarchism could also have “a certain systematic quality and order,” 5 he also explained that the paintings for which he reserved the name Composition (seven major oils completed before 1914) were developed over a “long period of time” so that the careful planning would not seem obvious.6 For an artist committed to reaching an audience in order to communicate his utopian hopes, Kandinsky’s discussion of an audience’s reaction seems quite paradoxical. How did he expect the spectator to become involved in a process that seemed anarchistic or random, especially when he wrote: “The artists must have something to say for his task is not the mastery of form, but the suitability of that form to its content.”7 Scholars, including myself, have acknowledged that Kandinsky used the term anarchistic to describe his new works in addition to the paintings and music of his contemporaries, but most have primarily viewed his use of the term as an aesthetic choice, as an emphasis of his belief in freedom from stylistic rules unconnected to a concern for audience participation.8 Nonetheless, 2

Compositions 6 and 7 are larger, 195 x 300 and 200 x 300 cm respectively. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” Der Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), English translation in Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, vol. 1 (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 242. 4 Ibid. 5 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” in Complete Writings on Art, 242. 6 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (1912), English translation in Complete Writings on Art, 218. 7 Ibid., 213. 8 Reinhard Zimmermann refers briefly to Kandinsky’s association of anarchism with freedom but does not explore this connection, see Die Kunsttheorie von Kandinsky, vol. 2 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002), 658. The cultural historian, Peter Jalevich, is one of the few who wrote about the possibility of anarchism’s 3

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despite recent contextual investigations into the relationship between anarchism and the practices of Cubism and/or the Russian avant-garde,9 the impact of anarchism upon Kandinsky’s commitment to public communication, as well as his structural and thematic choices for his paintings, is still not usually discussed.10 One reason Kandinsky’s paintings have not been viewed in relation to anarchist concepts is their visual difference from those of well-known impact on Kandinsky, particularly his theater pieces; see Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 217–235. Following the lead of German cultural historians such as Ulrich Linse and Janos Frecot who examined the immersion of intellectuals in Germany at the turn of the century in anarchist theories, as well as art historians and historians such as Robert and Eugenia Herbert, and Donald Drew Egbert, I posited in a 1987 essay that Kandinsky’s awareness of Russian and German anarchist theories along with other alternatives to established institutions such as Theosophy were critical for Kandinsky’s development of abstraction; see Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future,” Art Journal, 46, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 38–45. An expanded analysis of these ideas may be found in Long, “Constructing the Total Work of Art: Painting and the Public,” in Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910–1925, ed. Jill Lloyd (Ostfildern and New York: Hatje Cantz/Neue Galerie New York, 2013), 32–47. 9 See, for example, Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, “Introduction,” in their anthology, A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9, as well as their other books and essays; Alan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); Nina Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and most recently Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). These contextual results have often been challenged or ignored by other scholars focusing on Cubism; see, for example, Rosalind Krauss, “The Circulation of the Sign” (1992) in The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) 25–85, or Anne Umland, Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 16–27, 33–39 who make no reference to the possible impact of anarchism upon Picasso. 10 Although the catalog for a 2011 exhibition, Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border, ed. Elsa Smithgall (Washington, D. C., The Phillips Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2011), discusses the impact of Theosophy and Symbolism, it does not mention anarchism. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1912) mentions neither Theosophy nor anarchism, relegating the possibility of such concepts to a footnote, 35 note 3.

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anarchist painters such as the French artist Paul Signac. With the exception of size, Kandinsky’s Composition V seems to have little in common with Signac’s embodiment of anarchist thought in his major work—In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come. This large-scaled oil painting of 1895 included not only the French symbol of anarchism—the rooster—in the lower right but also a peaceful and calm scene of the pleasures that cooperation and mutual aid could bring to the masses.11 In contrast to Signac’s work, Composition V seems discordant and turbulent, with no obvious references to anarchism. Yet, Kandinsky not only referred several times to Signac’s 1899 book, which was translated into German in 1910, but also pointed to the role of neo-impressionist color as the beginning of his process of abstracting images from the external descriptive world. 12 In addition to admiring Signac’s use of color, Kandinsky shared other affinities with this famous French painter. Like Signac, Kandinsky drew support from the communitarian understanding of anarchism, particularly from the Russian philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin, who was then living in exile in London and also from the German mystical anarchist Gustave Landauer, who was active in intellectual circles in Munich around the Blaue Reiter. Both provided sustenance for Kandinsky’s explanation of freedom from established artistic principles based on the concept of natural law as well as for his faith in the power of the arts to effectively modify the direction of society. From the turn of the century to World War I in both Germany and Russia, anarchism had many factions and philosophies that were contradictory, but most adherents, whether oriented toward individual or communal action, believed in an international brotherhood which would work to repair the inequalities of industrialization. Kropotkin and Landauer, who had translated many of the Russian’s tracts into German,13 11

For an illustration and analysis of the relation of Signac’s painting to anarchist concepts, see Signac 1863–1935, ed. Marina Ferretti–Bocquillon et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 195–200; and also Robin Roslak, Neoimpressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France (London: Ashgate, 2007), 126–132, 141–162, 186–192. 12 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Complete Writings 1, 149; Kandinsky cites the German edition of Signac’s work published by Axel Juncker, Charlottenburg, 1910. 13 Landauer translated, for example, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid into German in 1904. For a discussion of the impact of Kropotkin, as well as Proudhon, and Tolstoy upon Landauer, see Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: the Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) esp. 213ff.

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rejected written law—codified law—in favor of indigenous, communally inspired oral codes, or what today we might call vernacular sayings. Criticizing the middle class, particularly the Socialists for using these written systems so rigidly that they made the state and capitalism inseparable, Kropotkin called for “mutual aid” or freely agreed upon cooperation which he described as emerging from the “natural law” or the basically ethical morality of early peasant communities.14 Both Kropotkin and Landauer celebrated these indigenous codes as the truth that lay hidden behind the artificial structures imposed on humanity by established, authoritarian systems and both cited the “middle ages” as an example of a period when some artisans and farmers worked freely and cooperatively. Although a multitude of intellectuals from Emile Rousseau and Charles Darwin to the Russian Symbolist Vladimir Solovyov referred to the concept of “natural law” in their writings, communally inclined anarchists or as Kropotkin termed their philosophy—“anarchist communism”—were predicated on the possibility that change in society could be possible if protest was continuous. Kropotkin’s call to artists to use their particular skills, their “impressive pictures,” to portray the “heroic struggles of the people against their oppressors” by unconventional means was particularly significant to those committed to using artistic practice to express utopian goals.15 Scholars of anarchism, such as Andrew Carlson and others, believe that in Germany they “exerted power all out of proportion to their numbers.”16 Herwarth Walden whose Sturm gallery gave Kandinsky and his Blaue Reiter group its first exhibition in Berlin in 1912, encouraged anarchist poets such as Paul Scheerbart and the anarchist architect Bruno Taut to write for his Sturm journal. 17 Taut, who had incorporated Lunn explains that Landauer’s reference to his approach as anarcho-socialist was, most likely, an attempt to unite both groups, see 104–105 and 190–194. 14 See the collection of Kropotkin’s essays, especially “Anarchist Communism” (1880) in Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. Roger N. Baldwin (New York/London: Benjamin Blom, 1968); also, see Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 26–33. 15 See Kropotkin, “An Appeal to the Young” (1880) in Baldwin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, esp. 278. 16 Andrew Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, vol. 1: The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 7. 17 Walden knew Landauer as well as the anarchist and later revolutionist Erich Mühsam from the Berlin Neue Gemeinschaft circle, see Frecot, 337–338; see also accounts about Walden’s wife Else Lasker–Schüler by Erika Klüsener (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 44–68.

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Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid into his own philosophical justifications, was an admirer of Kandinsky and he praised Kandinsky’s incorporation of the principal of freedom—his openness to multiple styles—as a model for architects in a 1914 essay published in Walden’s Sturm journal.18 In June of that year, Kandinsky was invited to meet with Gustav Landauer and other anarcho-pacifists to discuss problems preventing world peace.19 Although he did not attend the conference, the invitation points to his interest in the political events of the day. Nonetheless, Kandinsky’s own writings were so scornful of political parties that few would sense his personal esteem for anarchism as a political, social, and cultural theory. In his 1911–12 manifesto, On the Spiritual in Art, he had assigned politicians to a very low level in his mapping of those who enlarged understanding of the world. Likening his schematic representation of affective types to a triangle, he had placed politicians—whom he specified as “elected representatives and their supporters”—on the lowest rung. Significantly, he did not include a range of political representatives, never citing racists or even monarchists, but primarily leftists and socialists. He praised socialists for their economic policies that attempted to kill off, what he termed, “the capitalist hydra” by severing “the head of evil.” But similar to Kropotkin and Landauer, he critiqued them for being unthinking followers of doctrines and platitudes, and especially for their hatred of anarchism about which, he claimed, they knew little except for “the terrifying name.”20 18

Bruno Taut, “Eine Notwendigkeit,” Der Sturm 4, no. 196–197 (February 1914) in English translation in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 123–126. 19 For a discussion of this conference see Lunn, p. 245. Letters from the Serbian writer Dimitri Mitrinoviþ to Kandinsky discuss the forthcoming peace conference, see Mitrinoviþ to Kandinsky, June 25, 1914, June 30, 1914, and undated in Gabriele Münter–Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. See also a letter to Kandinsky dated June, 1914, in which Mitronoviþ mentioned that Landauer had introduced him to the writings of Kropotkin. See, in addition, Shulamith Behr, “Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic; PanChristian Universalism and the Yearbook ‘Towards the Mankind of the Future through Aryan Europe,’” in The Oxford Art Journal 15, 1 (1992), 81–88. 20 See Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art in Complete Writings 1, 139. However, the English words “republicans or democrats” in that translation of the German “Volksvertretungsanhänger oder Republikaner” would be better served by the translation “elected representatives and their followers or Republicans”; see W. Kandinsky, Über des Geistige in der Kunst, 7th ed. (Bern–Bümpliz: Benteli, 1963), 36.

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In his memoirs published shortly before World War I, Kandinsky discussed the importance of stirring up “a critical attitude toward accustomed phenomena.” 21 He even praised “activism” as central to freedom by noting the significance student protests had for him when he was at the university in Moscow in the 1880s. Repression, particularly that of student groups, he explained, had led to both individual and collective activism that contributed to undermining the rigid conditions of his time. He guardedly admitted his anti-institutional attitudes in these memoirs by referring to his student days where he had discovered his preference for the internal law or the natural law of the Russian peasant in contrast to what he called the inflexibility and rigidity of centralized, government rules.22 Without flexible critical stimuli, Kandinsky believed change would be difficult, and like Kropotkin and Landauer, he relied on the concept of natural law to provide him with a defense for moving into areas that were uncharted, even disturbing to many. In his longest and most theoretical essay in the yearbook of the Blaue Reiter as well as in the slightly earlier manifesto On The Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky used the concept of “natural law” in relation to his belief that an underlying law or principle existed for all the arts, calling this principle Innere Notwendigkeit (Inner or internal necessity). He explained in the almanac essay, “Über die Formfrage” (On the question of form), that three elements—(1) the personal, (2) the period—that is time and space including the national, and (3) the universal made up Innere Notwendigkeit and he stressed that all three had to be exchangeable in order to be forceful. 23 The key word was “exchangeable”—that is—all three were in play in the creation of new forms, which had to be both the “child of its time” and the “mother of the future.”24 Believing that the exchange, the intermingling of different styles—abstraction and realism, different art forms, drama, poetry, and music—were strengthened due to their origins in natural law, he and Franz Marc—the co-editor of the almanac—had the confidence not only to break with the dominant styles of the past but also to emphasize their freedom from all rules. 25 As a result, for the Blaue 21 Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” (1913) in Collected Writings 1, 361–362. Turchin’s emphasis that the Reminiscences were filtered through Kandinsky’s attempt to publicize himself further reminds us of the importance of his choosing to mention activism in 1913. 22 Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” in Collected Writings 1, 362. 23 Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form” in Collected Writings 1, 240–242. 24 Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual” in Collected Writings 1, 131. 25 Quotations from Franz Marc, “The ‘Savages’ of Germany” in The Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912), documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit (London: Thames and

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Reiter Almanac, he and his co-editor Franz Marc contrasted illustrations of their own art with marginalized art pieces such as anonymous Bavarian religious paintings, Gothic woodcuts and sculpture, Russian lubki, and other folk artifacts to both unsettle and educate the onlooker accustomed to established traditions. In this, they were supported by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, who advocated alternative art forms as an educational tool to unsettle the “educated Europeans” 26 filled with “a cultural arrogance” about the superiority of Western Renaissance art. They also selected artworks and essayists who could further convey the reasons for their disengagement from the academic requirements of a narrative structure or conventional notions of beauty and harmony to communicate their utopian message. Because they believed music was the most removed from convention, musical scores by several contemporary composers, along with explanatory essays by the composers Arnold Schönberg and Thomas von Hartmann, as well as the theorist Nikolai Kulbin, were included in the yearbook. All the essayists on music were particularly close to Kandinsky and not only supported learning from the various arts, but were also engaged in this practice. Indeed, Schönberg, von Hartmann, and Kulbin, who painted as well as composed music, disputed the need for parallel text and music.27 In his essay “Free Music,” Kulbin proscribed musical intervals he called “the discord” in order to excite and arouse the observer, arguing that the concept of natural law justified the resulting “dissonance.” 28 He urged artists to “provoke the creative imagination of the spectator” so that both would work together in creating the picture.” 29 Von Hartmann, who wrote the music for Hudson, 1974), 61 and Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form” in Collected Writings 1, 241. 26 Worringer, “The Historical Development of Modern Art” (1911), English translation in German Expressionism, 10–13. 27 Arnold Schönberg, “The Relationship to the Text” in 1974 London doc. ed., 90– 102, esp. 102. 28 N [Nikolai] Kulbin, ‘Free Music’ in 1974 London doc. ed., 141–146. Kulbin’s essay is an abridged version of one that appeared in 1910 in the St. Petersburg publication Studiia Impressionistov; an English excerpt appears in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: 1976), 11–17. 29 Kulbin, ‘Svobodnaia muzyka’ (Free music), Studiia Impressionistov (1910), 26. Kandinsky’s letters to Kulbin from the end of 1911 and the beginning of 1912 indicate that the Russian theorist sent Kandinsky a lubok of the Last Judgement; see E. F. Kovtun’s editing of Kandinsky’s letters to Kulbin in Monuments of Culture, New Discoveries (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1981).

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Kandinsky’s stage composition, not only referred to anarchist ideas, but actually titled his essay “On Anarchy in Music.” This composer is often seen in photographs of the Blaue Reiter group next to Kandinsky, who described his fond feelings towards the composer and his wife as similar to the closeness he felt with Marc and his wife. 30 In his essay, von Hartmann urged his readers to “welcome” the anarchistic principles that led composers to use what he called “opposite sounds combinations” to awaken the audience. 31 Indeed, he deliberately used the German verb “erschüttern”—to shock—to describe the effect he wanted to produce.32 He also used the term Innere Notwendigkeit to justify his use of disharmonious sounds. Significantly, he argued for the combination of both conscious and unconscious intuitive choices to produce the strongest direction for future creativity. Like his composer friends, Kandinsky used the concept of Innere Notwendigkeit not just to point out the evocative potential of color and form but more importantly to justify the pairing of color and forms previously thought to be disjunctive, stating: “the incompatibility of certain forms and certain colors should be regarded not as something ‘disharmonious,’ but conversely, as offering new possibilities.” 33 He added slightly disguised corporal images to his collection of devices to involve the spectator, and similar to Kulbin and Hartmann, Kandinsky also mentioned that some of these stimuli might be subliminal or 30

Kandinsky unpublished letter to Gabriele Münter, August 10, 1911, in Gabriele Münter–Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachaus, Munich. Jelena Hahl–Koch noted that Kandinsky used the more private Du rather than the more formal Sie when communicating with von Hartmann; see Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl–Koch (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), 138–139, and 157–159. In the 1981/1983 German edition, Hartmut Zelinsky refers to the impact of the ego anarchist Max Stirner but does not discuss communal anarchists. 31 In two interviews (June 18, 1965 and September 8, 1965) with von Hartmann’s wife Olga in New York, she recalled how both men would experiment with writing to friends in Russia and receiving answers although the letters were not mailed. She also described their shared interest in extra sensory phenomena and in Theosophical literature. 32 For the German edition used, see Th. v. Hartmann, “Über Anarchie in der Musik,” Der Blaue Reiter, documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1965), 90; for the English version, see 1974 London doc. ed., 114. 33 Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual” in Collected Writings 1, 163. He indicated that a geometric form such as a triangle could communicate a mood of say stability or peacefulness but its placement in relation to its position of the canvas could change that perception.

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“subconscious” and that they could “exert just as lively and creative an effect.”34 Believing that painting was both the most permanent and at the same time the most immediate of all the arts as it conveyed “to the spectator the whole content of the work at one moment,” 35 Kandinsky urged the exchange as well as the incorporation of multiple, contrasting stimuli in one—total art work, “a truly monumental art,” which he felt was on the edge of a major expansion.36 To emphasize that he was not prescribing absolute laws, Kandinsky often warned that his equations of stimuli were “extremely provisional and clumsy.”37 Rigid rules would not have been appropriate for an artist committed to freedom from established, conventional ideas. But the potential of “different elements” in “different forms” or the “different arts” synthesized into one “monumental art” was the challenge for him before World War I.38 In Composition V, painted during the months that he was completing On the Spiritual and the Blaue Reiter Almanac, Kandinsky combined many of these multiple dissonant stimuli about which he had been writing to produce what he thought would be a total work of art in one oil. In reexamining this canvas, we might be struck, even startled by a dominant black shape running from the top right and thickening as it curves toward the center—particularly as it contrasts with the multiple colors and amorphous shapes of the rest of the canvas. But on second impression, the spectator may find images—trumpets and walled cities with bent towers—particularly in the upper portion of the canvas. I and other scholars have pointed to Kandinsky’s explanation that the theme of the Last Judgment was the starting point for this oil as well as for a number of other works. 39 In several smaller works related to this theme, the religious motifs—the golden trumpet in the glass painting, and the angels in the upper corner blowing the blue and black outlined trumpets whose blast bends the towers of a walled city atop a mountain in the watercolor Sound of Trumpets (Fig. 3.1) is clear—and the visual source for these motifs is evident in the Russian folk prints or 34

Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual” in Collected Writings 1, 168–169. Ibid., 154. 36 The clearest statement for this possibility is in “On the Spiritual” in Collected Writings 1, 155. 37 Ibid., 189. 38 Ibid., 192. 39 Kandinsky, manuscript prepared for lecture at the Kreis der Kunst exhibition, Cologne, Jan. 30, 1914, published in J. Eichner, Kandinsky und Munter (Munich, 1957), 109–116, and discussed in Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 108 ff. 35

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lubki (Fig. 3.2). The motifs in the oil painting All Saints Day (Fig. 3.3) may be slightly less clear but the arrangement of angels in the corner blowing their trumpets over the walled city atop a mountain is the same. But compared to those smaller works, the angels in the large oil study (Plate 3.2) for Composition V are barely legible although the scheme of the motifs—the walled city with bent towers atop a mountain peak in the top center—is still quite apparent. In the final work, we see how Kandinsky simplified their corporal visibility into a skeletal line veiled by amorphous colors.40 Even the trumpets in the upper corners are hard to perceive due to their illusionary transparency (the background colors are visible within their black outline).

Figure 3.1. Wassily Kandinsky, Sound of Trumpets (Study for Large Resurrection), 1911. Watercolor, ink. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

40

Most of the motifs are not easily identified even in the large oil study for Composition V in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. For a specific discussion of these motifs in a number of Kandinsky’s other works between 1910– 1912, see Long, Kandinsky, 75–107.

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Figure 3.2. Vasily Koren, Scene from Revelation VIII: 10–13, 1696. Colored woodcut. Reproduced in Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii, Kartiny iz Biblii i Apokalipsisa, raboty mastera Korenia (Paintings from the Bible and the Apocalypse, made by the Master of Korenia), St. Petersburg, 1881. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 3.3. Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints’ Day II, 1911. Oil on canvas. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

Using very thin, undulating black lines and pale colors at the bottom corners of the canvas, Kandinsky produced a very destabilizing, immaterial quality in this canvas of over six feet. At the center of the canvas, where the disguised shapes of the trumpet and the dark curving shapes merge and seem to meet the eye of the spectator, an awareness suddenly grows that the dark, ominous shape increasing in size as it curves from the upper edge toward the spectator, may be an attempt to represent the terrible sound of the trumpet on Judgment Day. Others had tried to represent sound visually through color and line—for example in a nineteenth century Lubok (Fig. 3.4), the stream of sound is represented by a widening rectangular shape positioned diagonally across the print—but no other artist (to my mind) has been so successful in conveying the blasting sound of Judgment.

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Figure 3.4. Detail from the Last Judgment, etching, first half of the nineteenth century. Reproduced in Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii, Kartiny iz Biblii i Apokalipsisa, raboty mastera Korenia (Paintings from the Bible and the Apocalypse, made by the Master of Korenia), St. Petersburg, 1881. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Kandinsky had begun Composition V (and a number of other works) with the theme of struggle from the biblical narrative of the Last Judgment, a theme which had much resonance in the indigenous Russian and German peasant cultures of the middle ages from which Kropotkin and Landauer believed the concept of mutual aid evolved. Worringer had also praised medieval artifacts for their power compared to conventional academic images. Kandinsky, however, did not want to replicate past renditions of Judgment Day and instead used multiple stimuli from the different arts to evoke the disturbing mood and anxiety of the present. The discord of contrasting colors and the disjunction of barely visible motifs would startle and then create an illusion of expanded space that appeared to “turn the painting into a being hovering in mid-air”41 or one could even say—a stage, upon which the struggle for contemporary revelation could be waged—a process that he continued to explore after the War. 41

Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual” in Collected Writings 1, 194–195.

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Kandinsky learned about the subliminal power of images and the use of vibrant color from many sources. Signac wanted to challenge conventional ways of thinking by depicting a golden age brought about the natural law of mutual assistance, but his peaceful, calm work could only be the beginning as Kandinsky stated. It could not suggest continuous protest. Across Europe, overlapping circles of intellectuals including Theosophists, Symbolists, Bergsonists, Nietzschean followers, as well as anarchists, were all committed to exploring new processes of thought to bring about change in the world order, 42 but the contribution of the communal anarchists, particularly their commitment to freedom from rules and their embrace of the concept of mutual aid from what they believed were the Middle Ages (or what Worringer considered the “gothic” period) should not be neglected as we try to re-examine the achievement of Kandinsky. Before World War I began, Kandinsky had produced two more Compositions that were not only larger than Composition V, but whose apocalyptic imagery were less important to sensation of conflict than were the overlays of strident amorphous color shapes with contrasting irregular lines. While composers such as Hartmann and Schönberg supported the idea of dissonance as a new sound of the period, it was the anarchist philosophy of embracing natural law that allowed Kandinsky to believe that shock of the unconventional could have the power to bring about change. Only then could he transform a canvas into a mythical stage in which color and line could enact the struggle that would bring revelation—higher knowledge—to his audience. However, the communal anarchists’ embrace of rural, peasant life rather than that of the urban laborer eventually led Stalinist communists, Frankfurt school theoreticians, as well as French post-Structuralists to insist that anarchist groups were romantic and nostalgic. Georg Lukács, for example, writing in the thirties, long after the Soviet communists had moved toward enforcing a centralized and bureaucratic state, linked anarchism with bohemian confusion and an inability to comprehend the economic difficulties of the proletariat. As the Soviet state began to eliminate its political opponents,43 scholars have chronicled how Stalinist 42

For further discussion of the impact of Symbolism and Theosophy upon Kandinsky, see Long, Kandinsky, 13–51. 43 For Lukács’ dismissal of anarchism, see “‘Grösse und Verfall’ des Expressionismus,” Internationale Literatur 1 (1934) in English translation in German Expressionism, 313–317. For a discussion of Kropotkin’s critique of Lenin and others before he died in 1921 in Russia, see Avrich, 225–228.

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communists massacred anarchists. The collective critiques of anarchism repeated throughout the twentieth century have obscured the tremendous appeal of communitarian anarchists to “progressive utopians” before World War I. The impact of their call for continuous protest through opposition to established forces should be viewed as integral to Kandinsky’s development of abstraction and its vibrant embodiment in a total work of art. Anarchist concepts underlay Kandinsky’s antiinstitutional commitment to freedom of choice, an attitude that allowed him to embrace the discordant and dissonant to awaken the unaware—the dormant masses. Although Kandinsky’s idea of incorporating multiple stimuli into one total work of art to strengthen the impact upon the viewer may not always be interpreted as activist, perhaps we in the twenty-first century should enlarge our understanding of what we mean by activism. Altering our perception of the dominant system through visual and aural dissonance is central to the critical discourse about performance art and multi-media presentations today. This paper argues that Kandinsky addressed issues of spectatorship under the guise of early twentieth century anarchism to form questions about how the general public was to be lifted from its complacency. These issues were not just relevant at the beginning of the twentieth century but are still crucial for all of us in the twenty-first.

CHAPTER FOUR PRODUCING A GRAMMAR OF PAINTING: COLOR AND FORM IN THE MANUSCRIPTS OF IVAN KLIUN VIKTORIA SCHINDLER

In the history of Russian art, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century represent the birth of abstract painting, which moved away from the reproduction and imitation of nature towards the autonomy of artistic media such as color, form, and line. Color, along with its effect on and interaction with form, was assigned a special role in the Russian avant-garde. In Moscow, renowned artists such as Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), as well as the lesser-known Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Olga Rozanova (1886–1918), and Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886–1961) employed colorful, floating, and overlapping surfaces in their paintings. At GINKhUK in Petrograd,1 Mikhail Matiushin (1861–1934) explored the perception of colors and forms and developed the theory of extended viewing.2 Ivan Kliun (1873–1943), who likewise belongs to the lesser-known Russian avant-garde artists, experimented with combinations of color and form in his paintings. Although Kliun was actively involved with the 1

St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914 until 1924. From 1924 to 1991, the city was known as Leningrad. 2 GINKhUK—Institute of Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Chudozestvennoj Kultury), Leningrad. For more about Matiushin and his work at GINKhUK, see Isabel Wünsche, Kunst & Leben. Michail Matjuschin und die Russische Avantgarde in St. Petersburg (Cologne: Boehlau, 2012); Margareta Tillberg, “Coloured Universe and the Russian Avant-Garde. Matiushin on Colour Vision in Stalin`s Russia 1932” (dissertation, Stockholm University, 2003), http://su.divaportal.org /smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A200230&dswid=3921.

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leaders of the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century and made significant contributions to the development of suprematism and nonobjective art, his name and artistic legacy are still largely unknown, even today. Following the October Revolution of 1917, the political situation in Russia fostered the creation of a number of art academies and cultural organizations in Moscow and Petrograd. Kliun and his contemporaries all were active at the same cultural establishments in the early 1920s, including IZO NARKOMPROS3 and the new institutes and academies of art such as VKhUTEMAS, 4 INKhUK, 5 and RAKhN. 6 These were true oases of artistic production and scholarly research, places where experimental and theoretical investigations, often accompanied by the industrial production of design items, brought about a radical change in the history of Russian art. As part of these institutions’ programs in the early 1920s, the Russian avant-gardists—especially Kandinsky and Matiushin as the driving forces behind the newly founded institutions INKhUK, RAKhN, and GINKhUK—endeavored to explore the artistic media and their effect on the human psyche. The search for objective methods of artistic investigation became one of their primary aims. They hoped that researching the various elements of art would allow them to understand the principles of combining artistic elements in artwork and to apply them in a targeted way. The common objective of these avant-gardists was to establish a serious science of art in Russia. Justifying the study of the arts as its own scientific discipline would put it on equal footing with the natural sciences, but it also meant that interdisciplinary research would be essential to its success. Plans called for artists and researchers from various fields such as physics, physiology, psychology, chemistry, and philosophy to work together in order to investigate and assess artwork in laboratory experiments. 3 IZO NARKOMPROS—Visual Art Section of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia. Otdel izobrazitelnych iskusstv), established January 1918. 4 VKhUTEMAS—Higher State Art-Technical Studios (Vysshie gosudarstvennye khudozhestvenno-technicheskie masterskie), which existed from 1918 to 1927 in Moscow. 5 INKhUK—Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut Chudozhestvennoi Kultury), Moscow. 6 RAKhN—Academy of Artistic Sciences, Moscow. After 1925, GAKhN—State Academy of Artistic Sciences (Gosudarstvennaia Akademia Khudozhestvennykh Nauk).

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Kliun’s dedication to art and his close friendship with Malevich and Matiushin meant that he found himself in the middle of many important cultural events between 1915 and 1925. Among other things, he exhibited works with renowned avant-garde artists, was actively involved with administrative duties and teaching at art institutes such as VKhUTEMAS and INKhUK, and oversaw the central exhibition office at IZO NARKOMPROS. Over the years, Kliun grappled with the primary elements of expression such as color and form in an attempt to create a kind of grammar for painting. Just as music has its theory of harmony and a system of notation, Kliun believed that painting, too, should have its own collected arrangement of fundamental principles. He left behind a large collection of manuscripts and essays that paved the way for fundamental theoretical questions about art, including suprematism, cubism, color and its effect, correspondences between colors and forms, the texture 7 of painting, light, rhythm, and composition. When compared to the literary estates of great artists such as Kandinsky, Matiushin, and Malevich, Kliun’s is no less exciting. Moreover, it reveals that the artist did not lack in creativity or intellectual acumen. Kliun’s cubo-futurist, suprematist, and spherical compositions, abstract wooden reliefs and sculptures, and numerous innovative sketches for mobiles 8 dating from around 1918, distinguish him as a pioneer of abstract art in Russia. This article probes the study on the primary elements of painting in Kliun’s writings, in which this discourse originates. The aim is to shed light on the ideas found in the artist’s largely unknown writings on color, light, and questions of composition and reveal why Kliun wrote so many theoretical texts, which are still largely unpublished, even today. In addition, it addresses the development of Kliun’s views on art theory and examines how the exchange of ideas with Russian colleagues influenced him. Kliun’s rediscovered manuscripts, in particular, provide answers to certain aspects of the discourse that have yet to be fully understood and appreciated. By drawing on excerpts from unpublished pieces to demonstrate Kliun’s contribution to the development of the science of art in Russia, this exploration of Kliun ultimately illustrates the wealth of

7

In Russian sources, the definition faktura, identical with German Faktur, is common. 8 Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is known today as the inventor of the mobile, but Kliun’s drawings preceded his ideas. Author’s note.

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unique ideas contained in his writings about art theory and the effect of color and its interaction with geometric forms. In Russia, the period from 1917 into the 1950s was shaped by a number of political upheavals. In the mid to late 1920s, the communist leaders began to regard avant-garde art as a relic of capitalist thought, which meant it conflicted with communist ideology. The doors of all the art academies and cultural institutions established after the October Revolution were closed for good by 1933. The works of the Russian avant-garde were banned from the public and disappeared for more than half a century into museum storages or were destroyed entirely. Renewed interest in the avant-garde from abroad began to grow only at the end of the 1970s, and it was not until the 1980s that avant-garde art was “rediscovered” in Russia. From today’s perspective, the theoretical tenets and artistic practices of the Russian avant-garde in the early 1920s represent a unique experiment in the history of art never replicated to such a degree in any other country. The achievements and ideas of the Russian avant-garde had a lasting effect on the artistic views of later generations and trends in art across Europe— impacting even the works of American abstract expressionists.

Life and career Ivan Kliun was born Ivan Vasilyevich Kliunkov in 1873 to a farming family in the small village of Bolshiye Gorky in the province near Vladimir in Russia.9 Already as a child, Kliun showed great passion and talent for drawing, but he was denied an official artistic education at an academy. Around 1900, Kliun lived and worked mostly as a clerk or bookkeeper in Moscow and, in 1906, he started attending private lessons in the studios of W. Fisher, A. Bolshakov, I. Mashkov, and finally Fyodor Ivanovich Rerberg. 10 It was in Rerberg’s studio that Kliun became acquainted with Malevich. In the five years of studying at Rerberg’s studio, Kliun and Malevich became close and would ultimately remain lifelong friends. Together they explored new art movements, discussed

9

Ivan Kliun, “Autobiografiia,” [Autobiography] TS, Nr. AB–092, Costakis Archive of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) Thessaloniki: 2; Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarabianov, eds., Ivan Kliun: Moi put’ v iskusstve. Vospominaniia, Stat‘ji, Dnevniki [Ivan Kliun: My way in the art. Reminiscences, essays, diaries] (Moscow: “RA,” 1999), 64, 502. 10 Kliun, “Autobiografiia,” 2.

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different theoretical questions in art, and participated in numerous exhibitions.11 From 1908 to 1914, Kliun and Malevich focused on the same artistic themes, producing portraits of each other and even living together with their families in Moscow for a short time. Here they were visited by artists such as Matiushin and Tatlin.12 From 1914 to 1919, Kliun belonged to a group of young avant-garde artists, including Malevich, Popova, Rodchenko, Udaltsova, and others. Kliun exhibited his works, founded new artistic societies, and published manifestos with these artists. During this time, he created several cubist and cubo-futurist paintings (Plate 4.1) which reveal Kliun’s virtuosity in color composition. Until 1919, Kliun shared Malevich’s ideas of suprematism, which is why numerous suprematist works by Kliun exist from this time. (Fig. 4.1) The term supremus, which Malevich used to define his newly created art movement, means “leading” or “dominant.” 13 As evident in the many definitions and arguments for the new style in his manuscripts, Kliun engaged with suprematism not only from an artistic perspective but also from a theoretical one. He wrote: The suprematist perception of the world entails the world’s dissolution into non-objectivity. . . . Thanks to intuitive reason, suprematism’s forms are created out of nothing. . . . The square is the face of new art. . . . If each form in a painting is connected with the whole, then in suprematism, each form exists autonomously without any dependence on the others; parts of the image are present and available for consideration, though they remain isolated from each other, void of interaction. The aim of suprematist works is to eliminate all of the old styles and canons of painting. For example, if all forms are shown moving in one direction, then one of the forms is placed in the opposite direction to destroy this rhythm and symmetry. The same thing happens with color.14

11

Kliun, “Autobiografiia,” 2. Ivan Kliun, “Moi put’ v iskusstve,” [My way in the art] MS (published) in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 86. 13 It should be noted that the Russian avant-gardists always differentiated between suprematism and nonobjective art (bespredmentnoe iskusstvo). Kliun was no exception. Presumably, the reason was that suprematism was Malevich’s invention, which reflected his personal, very subjective worldview. Author’s note. 14 Ivan Kliun, “Suprematism,” in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 268–269. 12

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Figure 4.1. Ivan Kliun, Suprematist Composition, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 62.5 cm. Private collection, Europe.

Kliun presented his first abstract color compositions in the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in November 1916. Even though no photographs from the exhibition exist, the titles of Kliun’s paintings, among them On the Red Background, Movement of Color Mass, and Color Decentralization, suggest that they were subordinate to color and form.15 In May 1919, during the Tenth State Exhibition of Nonobjective Art and Suprematism, Kliun exhibited sixty-two pieces under the title The Art of Color. 16 Kliun’s difference of opinion with Malevich led him to 15

Kliun v Tretyakovskoj galeree: K 125-letiju so dnia rozdeniia, exh. cat., ed. Andrej Sarabianov, State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow: “RA,” 1999) 12, 21. 16 Ivan Kliun, “Iskusstvo cveta,” in: Desiataia Gosudarstvennaia vystavka. Bezpredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematism [Non-objective Art and Suprematism, 10th state exhibition], exh. cat. (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe centralnoe vystavochnoe biuro. Otdel izobrazitelnych iskusstv Narodnogo Komissariata po prosvescheniju, 1919).

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abandon suprematism. In contrast to Malevich, Kliun’s geometric forms in his suprematist paintings remained colorful. Malevich went through only a brief phase of color-based suprematism between 1915 and 1916. In 1919, he limited his palette to just three colors: black, red, and white. Kliun announced his departure from suprematism in the famous programmatic essay The Art of Color, 17 appearing in the catalog of the Tenth State exhibition. Malevich’s and Kliun’s statements made during the exhibition are in essence quite similar. Both artists apply the concept of colorwriting (cvetopis) to their works. They also argue for elevating color to an autonomous element in the image, positing that the composition of the painting should adhere to the application of color and not the other way around. For Kliun, however, suprematism as a new artistic style had already reached its limits. Avant-garde art implied an ongoing process of evolution, and after four years, Kliun recognized that a number of things were preventing art from continuing to develop, such as the inflexible contours of geometric forms featuring a single hue without a progression of shades. Kliun felt constricted by suprematism and believed that nonobjective art, which provided artists with endless possibilities, was the only way out.18 The years following the October Revolution were a productive period for Kliun, filled with organizing and managing cultural life in Moscow, where he found himself in charge of the central exhibition office at IZO NARKOMPROS. In 1918, Kliun was appointed professor and given the task of teaching color at VKhUTEMAS.19 Kliun worked there from 1918 to 1921, when he left of his own accord.20 At the same time, Kliun chaired the main department of artistic disciplines in the faculty of painting while on the faculty of ceramics. In 1920, Kliun became a member of INKhUK

17

Ivan Kliun, “Iskusstvo cveta,” in: Desiataia Gosudarstvennaia vystavka. Bezpredmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematism [Non-objective Art and Suprematism, 10th state exhibition], exh. cat. (Moscow: Vserossiiskoe centralnoe vystavochnoe biuro. Otdel izobrazitelnych iskusstv Narodnogo Komissariata po prosvescheniju, 1919), 14–15; Kliun,“Iskusstvo cveta,” in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 360. 18 Kliun,“Moi put’v iskusstve,” MS in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 94. 19 At that point, VKhUTEMAS was known as the “Free State Art Studios.” (Gosudarstvennye svobodnye chudozhestvennye masterskie GSKhM.) 20 Kliun, “Autobiografiia,” 3. Hunger and a shortage of food in Moscow in the early 1920s made it necessary for Kliun to leave the academy. Unlike his colleagues, he did not lawfully receive food rations from VKhUTEMAS though he had a large family to sustain. Author’s note.

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in Moscow, which had been founded by Kandinsky and Rodchenko in 1919. Around 1919, Kliun began experimenting with light, he saw it as an additional element of painting that has a special effect on color and form: light diffuses form and intensifies color.21 The sharp contours of suprematist surfaces slowly gave way in Kliun’s paintings; semitransparent, almost interwoven three-dimensional forms began to fill the imaginary space of the image. Kliun’s own artistic breakthrough occurred in 1920 with his spherical compositions. (Plate 4.2) As in his suprematist paintings, there is no real up or down in the spherical compositions, only the space of the image enclosed by the edges of the work. Shimmering three-dimensional forms float weightlessly in space and enchant the viewer with their luminosity. According to Kliun, with regard to his spherical compositions: Everything floated and dissolved in the airy expanse, shimmering in various harmonious colors while a specific form entered into the scene now and again. This ensured the interplay of light and shadow depicted using one or more colors. Light exists as reality in nature. It can be blue, red, green, and so on. Light can assume any kind of form—round, oval, triangular. These forms and colors can be complex, flowing, merging, and melting into each other. If a single one of these colors fills the form and approaches its outline as it dissolves in the air, then other colors will flow into this first primary color (largely complementary colors). And the closer the color comes to the boundary of the form, the truer this is. Fading effects, gradation, and a beautiful play of color is created when another color passes through or covers the primary color. Rainbows and auroras are convincing examples of the existence of light in nature.22

For Kliun, light and light effects in three-dimensional geometrical figures were the purest form of abstract art, representing the next stage in the evolution of suprematism that had come before.23

The discourse on the primary elements of painting According to Kliun, he began focusing on the primary elements of painting when he dedicated himself to suprematism around 1916. Kliun 21

Ivan Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi” [The problem of color in the painting], Maliarnoe delo, no. 2 (1931): 46. 22 Kliun, “Moi put’v iskusstve,” MS in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 96–97. Author’s translation. 23 Ibid., 94–95. Author’s translation.

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believed that suprematism and nonobjective art provided the appropriate means to begin exploring the elements of painting, which meant focusing on an abstract language of form not tied to a specific subject or a literary context. By breaking down art into its constitutive elements, Kliun likewise saw the potential for creating a scientific and analytical approach to investigating art: Suprematism and non-objective art deconstructed the artworks into their constitutive elements, which allowed them to be investigated with analytical methods. The focus was no longer placed on socio-economic or ethnographic aspects; instead, primary importance was attached to the interplay of art’s primary elements, how they relate to each other in the composition and what effect they have on the viewer.24

In his early writings, Kliun included the following aspects in his understanding of the “primary elements of painting”: color, form, texture, composition, space, and volume. For Kliun, it is “the task of the elements in art to influence the human psyche and power of imagination. . . . ”25 In 1923, Kliun made the following observation: Color, light, and construction as features separate from the object form the pure elements of painting, and it is possible to explore their characteristics as such. . . . The elements of art are not subject to technical measurement, but rather to psychological or aesthetic perception alone.26

Breaking down the various arts into the primary elements that comprise them and researching their psycho-physiological effects on the viewers were topics that Kandinsky had already addressed in his treatise On the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911. Kandinsky was the first Russian artist to explore the primary elements of the arts and their psychological effects, including this aim in the programs of INKhUK and RAKhN in the early 1920s. Since Kliun also belonged to INKhUK, he was able to see for himself the programs that Kandinsky developed and follow the debates on the elements of art. According to Andrei Sarabianov, Kliun’s written estate included a copy of the speech “The Primary Elements of Painting” that Kandinsky held at INKhUK on May 29, 1920.27 24

Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 44. Author’s translation. Kliun, “Bespredmetnoe iskusstvo. Obschie polozheniia,” in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 275. 26 Ibid., 274. 27 Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 465 (note 186). 25

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Rooted in the tradition of the programs that Kandinsky had developed for INKhUK and RAKhN, Kliun’s goal was to establish the scientific study of art and to seek out objective research methods. Kliun also took up questions of composition and construction. According to Kliun, exploring the composition of painting and its relationship to colors and forms is only possible in abstract paintings. In realist and figurative painting, subject and content play a considerable role, thereby influencing the structure of the composition. These distinctive composition-related features can best be seen in constructivism, cubism, and nonobjective art. 28 The notions of a “grammar of painting” and “primary elements of painting,” which were first broached in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, became key concepts in Kliun’s writings on art starting in 1920. In terms of a grammar of painting, Kliun envisioned the creation of a practical guide for painters and art theorists that summarized the basics of color theory, the properties of color, contrasts, the interplay of forms and colors, and their possible combinations. There is no direct evidence in Kliun’s manuscripts that he had read Kandinsky’s treatise, but the two artists shared a number of conceptual parallels and made similar statements. In an unpublished manuscript from around 1920, Kliun describes Kandinsky’s position on the primary elements of painting, endorsing his view: In his lecture on the Institute of Artistic Culture, W. W. Kandinsky attests that the basic characteristics of art also comprise its elements and that they are the most valuable resources that art has to offer. They alone are what matters. Everything else is of lesser value, even to the point of being superfluous.29

In one of his later manuscripts dating from around 1940, Kliun even considered himself to be a pioneer in the discovery of the elements of painting: When I broke down painting into its constitutive elements (color, form, composition, texture, content), I intuitively created simple compositions 28 Ivan Kliun, “Kompoziciia i Faktura” [Composition and texture of painting], MS (partly published in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 354–356), Costakis Archive of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) Thessaloniki: 2. 29 Ivan Kliun, “Elementy iskusstva,” MS (partly published in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 353–354), Nr. 623, the Khardziev archive, Amsterdam: 16.

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from simple geometric forms combined with small amounts of color, and I did so by exerting all of my mental strength and attempting to integrate these elements into a harmonious composition. Later I investigated and analyzed these elements. I believe that this is the beginning of a great endeavor. It means a lot to me that I was the one who started it all off by determining the elements of painting and, in doing so, that I was able to show what the principles and methods of investigation are for any artistic discipline.30

As shown above, Kliun attributed the discovery of the elements of painting to himself and not Kandinsky. In his autobiography, Kliun recalls one unpleasant incident that transpired between him and Kandinsky in 1920. 31 According to Kliun, he had written an article titled “On the Elements of Art,” which he gave to Kandinsky to have it published in the next issue of the journal of IZO NARKOMPROS. It was lost and Kliun accused Kandinsky of intentionally burying and then using the article for a public lecture during the conference about the establishment of INKhUK, which aimed at investigating the “elements of art.”32 However, Kandinsky’s writings clearly prove that he was the first of the two to engage with the topic, though Kliun pursued his own research into color and form independent of Kandinsky with results that differed to a certain extent. It is surprising that Kliun’s various manuscripts contain several passages that are fairly identical to some of Kandinsky’s statements, appearing to have been slightly reworded, though they have not been cited as quotes. There are some fundamental differences between Kliun and Kandinsky when it comes to analyzing the primary elements of painting. In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky declared that color and form “have an effect on the viewer’s soul.” 33 He viewed these primary elements as an abstract language of art especially suited to expressing spiritual meaning. In contrast, such anthroposophical views were rather foreign to Kliun, who did not address the development of human consciousness through art in his writing. Kliun was primarily interested in the effect of color on the human 30

Kliun, “Kompoziciia i Faktura,” MS, Costakis Archive of the SMCA Thessaloniki: 3. 31 (Vserossijskaja konferencija uchaschich i uchaschichsia GSKhM). The conference took place from June 1–20, 1920 in Moscow. 32 Ivan Kliun, “Moi put’ v iskusstve,” MS in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 103–104. 33 Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, ed. and trans. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 41, 47.

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psyche, the correspondence between colors and forms, and the creation of a grammar of painting. Many of Kandinsky’s manuscripts address the question of the meaning of abstract form. Kliun, on the other hand, uses form in a way that is devoid of meaning or substance. He believed that completely abandoning substance and meaning in abstract works featuring colors and forms was the only way for such paintings to truly become nonobjective art.

Kliun’s color theory Evidence of Kliun’s extensive knowledge of color can be found in multiple handwritten manuscripts that have yet to be systematically organized and edited. They contain a wealth of practical advice and theoretical considerations for painters, craftsmen, and those with an interest in art. In the end, Kliun believed it necessary to investigate the visual perception of color in connection with geometric forms to discover the principles of combining artistic elements. One part of these manuscripts consists of a collection of excerpts from scholarly treatises on color. One example is the unpublished manuscript Color Theory: The Science of Colors. 34 It consists of forty-five pages containing excerpts from the scientific treatises of three handbooks of W. Ostwald, F. Schestakov, and L. Richtera, which were published in Russian translations between 1926 and 1928.35 In his manuscript Color Theory, 36 Kliun recorded the essential information from Richtera’s book, such as the experiments of Isaac Newton,

34 Ivan Kliun, “Cvetovedenie. Nauka o cvetach” [Color theory: The science of colors], MS (unpublished), Nr. Ab–075, Costakis Archive of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) Thessaloniki. Hereinafter in the main text referred to as Color Theory. 35 Wilhelm Ostwald, Farbkunde (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1923); F. K. Shestakov, Soglasovanie cvetov. Dlia koloristov, khudozhnikov, khudozhnikov-prikladnikhov, i dlia sudentov i utchashichsia (Ivanovo-Voznesensk: Osnova, 1928); Leopold Richtera, Die Farbe als wissenschaftliches und künstlerisches Problem. Die Grundlagen der Farbenlehre für Künstler und Kunstgewerbler (Halle/Saale: Wilhelm Knapp, 1924). 36 Regarding the date of his manuscript, Kliun dated the first page with 1927, which should be taken as accurate because the original sources were published in Russian translation between 1926 and 1928.

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James Clerk Maxwell’s color wheel and his color mixing experiments,37 Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz’s theories of physiological color perception, the differences between spectral colors and color pigments, 38 the experiments of Eugène Chevreul, the phenomena of colored shadows by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and excerpts from the most famous lecture by Helmholtz, 39 a description of successive, simultaneous, and light-dark contrasts and their application in art as well as the psychological effects and the harmonics of color.40 Kliun shared Richtera’s view that the theory of colors is a complex subject touching on a number of fields, including physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, and philosophy. 41 In particular, Richtera emphasized that the issues pertaining to color aesthetics lacked a scientific basis at the time. Kliun agreed with Richtera that the harmony of colors is one of the most difficult aspects of color theory. Regardless of its texture, a color effect on the viewer is either that of harmony or disharmony, and, as experiments have demonstrated, individual colors have the power to evoke particular emotions and states of mind.42 However, not only is the question of the “sinnlich-sittliche” effect of color extremely complex, it is also one that rarely has a definitive answer.43 From Ostwald’s Farbkunde, Kliun noted the passages about the mixing of colors, the analogies between music and color tones, the composition of the achromatic scale, the ordering of colors in the color wheel and color triangle, and the physical properties of light and chemical properties of pigments. Kliun felt Ostwald’s description was very fitting when he wrote that the investigation and classification of color is impeded by the lack of 37 Kliun, “Cvetovedenie,” MS (unpublished), Costakis Archive of SMCA Thessaloniki: 7. Richtera, Die Farbe als wissenschaftliches und künstlerisches Problem, 27. 38 Kliun, “Cvetovedenie,” MS (unpublished), Costakis Archive of SMCA Thessaloniki: 6. 39 Hermann von Helmholtz, Optisches über Malerei: I. Die Formen; II. Die Hellingkeitsstufen; III. Die Farbe; IV. Die Farbenharmonie: Umarbeitung von Vorträgen, die in Berlin Düsseldorf und Cöln gehalten worden sind, 2nd edition (Braunschweig: 1876). 40 Kliun, “Cvetovedenie” MS (unpublished), Costakis Archive of the SMCA Thessaloniki. 41 Ibid., 1, quoted in Richtera, Die Farbe als wissenschaftliches und künstlerisches Problem, 1. 42 Kliun, “Cvetovedenie” MS (unpublished), Costakis Archive of SMCA Thessaloniki: 11. 43 Ibid., 14.

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scale and numbers, and also that a fundamental rule is missing as to how the gray and colorful sequences should be ordered correctly.44 These passages in Kliun’s manuscript include details on the authors, sources, and pages from which he quotes, showing Kliun to be a careful researcher. The manuscript is also something of a rarity that reveals how Kliun approached color, which sources he used to formulate his ideas, and how he put those ideas into practice and ultimately developed his own theories. The manuscript was written most likely between 1927 and 1928 as Kliun worked on two essays titled Cubism and The Problem of Color in Painting, which were published in professional journals in 1928 and 1931. The Problem of Color in Painting features the insights into color that Kliun had gathered over the years. Kliun examines and analyzes several passages from the manuscript Color Theory, which he skillfully weaves into and comments on in his essay. These manuscripts with collected excerpts ultimately served Kliun as reference works for both his theoretical essays and experimental work. Another portion of Kliun’s manuscripts comprise theoretical essays and writings on color that draw on the scientific and scholarly treatises mentioned above. This set of manuscripts consists of Kliun’s own theories about color and their properties. Kliun recorded his findings on color in numerous manuscripts and essays, such as Color in Painting, 45 Color, Form, and Space in Art and Their Interaction, 46 and Composition and Texture. 47 Two larger notebooks dating from the late 1930s titled Composition and Texture and Color, Form, and Space in Art and Their Interaction contain practical instructions on how to put together abstract compositions and use geometric forms with colors that work in harmony with each other. Kliun dealt with questions such as harmonious color schemes, the psychological effect of color, the correspondence between colors and forms and between color and texture, synesthesia, and the organization of colored forms in composition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Kliun aimed to document and create a system for the existing knowledge about color. In his 44

Kliun, “Cvetovedenie” MS (unpublished), Costakis Archive of SMCA Thessaloniki: 33; Ostwald, Farbkunde, 32. 45 Ivan Kliun, “Cvet v iskusstve zhivopisnom. Psychologicheskii etiud” [Color in painting. A psychological study], MS (unpublished), Nr. 633, the Khardziev archive, Amsterdam. 46 Ivan Kliun, “Cvet , Forma i prostransvo v iskusstve i ich vzaimootnoshenie,” MS in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 376–382. 47 Kliun, “Kompoziciia i faktura,” MS in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 354– 358.

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manuscripts, he describes the principles of combining colors and forms in painting and attempts to back up several of his ideas with scientific theories in order to create a grammar of painting for abstract art. If at the beginning Kliun pursued insights based on his own artistic work, it is most likely that he began to deal with the theory of color more intensively once he became a professor at VKhUTEMAS, where he taught color as a subject. In 1924, Kliun set up the theoretical department at the Museum for Artistic Culture, 48 where he did experimental work with colors and forms.49 From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, Kliun held lectures on color at the Museum of West European Art, 50 the State Academy of Art Sciences, 51 and for the Four Artists’ association. 52 In these lectures, however, Kliun came to the conclusion that the psychological effect of the elements of art, especially color, cannot be verified, at least not scientifically: Investigating the primary elements of art deepens and expands the nature and understanding of art. However, these primary elements are only accessible to psycho-physiological perception and not subject to measurements. It is possible to measure a technical construction, pressure, and resistance, but not the power of color. There is no way to measure the intensity of color. No one can say which of these two colors is more intense, red or light blue, and if someone does so, it’s only his own perception and to prove such a statement is impossible. Is it scientifically possible to define cold and warm colors? 53

In a number of manuscripts, Kliun referred to the effect that the elements of art have on the psyche and the difficulty of using science to objectively prove this impact. At the same time, he strove to find a plausible explanation based on scientific findings. In the end, he concluded that “some kind of psychological (aesthetic) and intuitive rules clearly exist to which the elements of art are subordinate.”54 48

Russian: Muzei zhivopisnoj kultury (MZhK) Kliun, “Autobiografiia,” 3. There is no extant documentary evidence of the lectures or position papers. Author’s note. 50 Russian: Muzei Zapadno–Evropeiskogo Iskusstva. 51 Russian: Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia Iskusstvoznaniia, Moscow. 52 Ivan Kliun, “Raznoe,” TS (unpublished), Nr. Ab–153, Costakis Archive of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) Thessaloniki: 1. 53 Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 44. Author’s translation. 54 Ibid., 44. 49

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The effect of color For Kliun, color was the guiding concept behind aesthetic thought and an autonomous element of the image. In his view, nonobjective art freed color from literary contexts and from its function as a means to visualize and imitate reality.55 Kliun was especially interested in the effect of color on the human psyche. Several of his manuscripts and excerpts from various color manuals contain references to color’s psychological characteristics. Kliun attempted to follow an objective and pragmatic approach to the medium of color, even if he was not always successful. He was aware that the effect of color resists rational explanations and depends mainly on sensory impressions. He recorded his thoughts on this issue in his unpublished manuscript Color in Painting: In order to understand the physical nature of color, we have to approach color scientifically and avoid attaching mystical properties to it, as Malevich does. However, color does have a mystical meaning; 56 for example, red is energizing, yellow is irritating, and black and white are calming. . . . I do not observe color from the position of its physical characteristics—that is the task of physicists—but from the perspective of its psychological effects. Many will say that this is still very subjective. This is true. But there are many objective factors in our subjective perceptions. There are many phenomena that evoke the same subjective impressions in most people.57

This passage importantly reveals that the goal of Kliun was to investigate and assess the subjective perceptions of test subjects in order to arrive at objective findings. Whereas color for Kandinsky embodied the hidden “inner” and “spiritual” reality behind the material world, color was an artistic element of expression for Kliun that, though it may have a psychological impact on the viewer and possess a certain aesthetic value, ultimately has no transcendental or extrasensory meaning. In one of his unpublished manuscripts, the artist recorded his subjective symbolic color associations:

55

Ivan Kliun, “Bespredmetnoe iskusstvo,” MS (1918–1919) in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 261. 56 Kliun’s statement sounds somewhat contradictory. With “mystical meaning,” Kliun is clearly describing the psychological effect of color. Author’s note. 57 Kliun, “Cvet v iskusstve zhivopisnom,” 2, 3. Author’s translation.

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The combination of white with black means sadness and everything in peaceful balance; violet–gray—desire, tender melancholy; violet–purple— horror. Dark green with light yellow means fear. Grass green with yellow—anger, hate. White with light blue means warm-heartedness and genuineness, purity of heart, naivety; pink—joie de vivre, love; red— revolution, prowess, strong activity. 58

Interestingly, in Kliun’s suprematist, cubo-futurist, and spherical paintings, composition is primarily based on color contrasts and harmonies, with color not being combined and used with the same connotations as mentioned above by Kliun. Kliun, like Kandinsky, drew inspiration from the sixth chapter of Goethe’s Color Theory titled “Sinnlich–sittliche Wirkung der Farbe,” which discusses the effects of color on the senses. Kliun was very familiar with Goethe’s ideas from different translations and commented on a number of excerpts from Color Theory, again emphasizing the subjectivity of the color effects: Goethe claims that green is one of the most pleasant colors; in my opinion, this is not very accurate and may even be wrong. Green contains a lot of yellow, and yellow is unpleasant. I prefer turquoise, the color of the sea, Paolo Veronese green or Schweinfurt green, meaning a light blue color with a green tone. This color has a calm and pleasant effect. That is my subjective perception.59

The appearance of different paint (kraska) played another important role for Kliun. He noted that “each paint has its own characteristic surface, depth, and features. It has aspects that are dry, hard, velvety, soft and sharp, and even its own density (light and heavy).”60 Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art contains a strikingly similar passage: “. . . Some paint can look sharp or piercing, while others appear smooth like velvet, so that one feels inclined to stroke them (dark ultramarine, chrome oxide green and rose madder).”61

58

Ivan Kliun, “Svoi mysli . . . Zadaniia po cvetu . . . , Chuzhie mysli . . . ,” MS (unpublished, untitled), Nr. Ab–086, Costakis Archive of the State Museum of Contemporary Art (SMCA) Thessaloniki: 2. Author’s translation. 59 Ibid. 60 Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 46. Author’s translation. Ivan Kliun, “Bespredmetnoe tvorchestvo,” in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 253; Kliun, “Elementy iskusstva,” 16. 61 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 42.

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Kliun’s manuscripts contain a typewritten sheet that reveals that he indeed viewed texture as a compositional element. It outlines which texture corresponds best to which color. A note written by Kliun in pencil at the bottom of the paper confirms that this table was meant to be included in Kliun’s essay The Problem of Color in Painting, but was left out for some unexplained reason. Characteristic texture for colors62 Color Red Orange Yellow, ocher yellow Light yellow Green Light blue Blue Purple Violet Brown Rose

Texture matte, smooth matte, porous subtle roughness sparkling like glass soft, matte like marble smooth smooth, profound, transparent smooth, heavy and dense as leather fibrous coarse, rough or multi-layered (depending on the shade) matte, porous

According to Kliun, texture—like form—can enhance or mute color. The effect of color is more intense when color is paired with a corresponding texture, which explains why it can appear sometimes more, sometimes less potent. 63 In Kliun’s understanding, a glossy texture deepens and effaces color; smooth, matte textures keep color on the surface; and coarse, rough, matte texture make color more alive to the viewer.64 Apart from psychological effects of color and the appearance of paint, Kliun was also interested in color’s chemical properties and their permanence or fixity. A loose page in Kliun’s manuscript titled Color Theory contains an excerpt from Ostwald’s own Farbkunde, which lists the color pigments along with their chemical properties. Brief notes on 62

Ivan Kliun, “Faktura, svojstvennaia cvetam” [Characteristic texture for colors], in “Svoi mysli,” MS (unpublished, untitled), Nr. Ab–086, Costakis Archive of SMCA Thessaloniki. 63 Ibid.,1. 64 Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 46. Author’s translation.

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color pigmeents and theiir permanencce are likewiise found in more of Kliun’s noteebooks. In Kliunn’s manuscrippts, there is a color wheeel and colorr triangle (farbtongleiches Dreieckk) (Fig. 4.2) that were crreated after th hose that Ostwald included in his Farbkunde. F

Figure 4.2. Ivan Kliun, Color Wheel and Color T Triangle, modeeled after W. Ostwald, undated, unpubblished. State Museum M of Conntemporary Artt, Costakis Collection, Thhessaloniki.

It shouldd be noted thhat Kliun wass a harsh crittic of Ostwalld’s color harmony moodel and judgeed it to be useless for artistss. Kliun claim med: It’s not a coincidence that t the Germaan artists regarrded Ostwald’ss color harmony as useless, whhich is based on n small and larrge intervals, beecause Ostwald ddid not allow for f any dissonan nce and found no rules for inttervals in color m mixtures.65

K Kliun’s collor tables In his m manuscripts, Kliun described d the principlees of combining colors and forms inn painting andd attempted to scientificallyy prove a numb ber of his ideas in ordder to construuct a grammar of paintinng for abstracct art. To illustrate thhe findings of his em mpirical reseaarch and th heoretical consideratioons, Kliun creaated tables forr colored form ms and gradattions with 65

Kliun, “Prooblema cveta v zhivopisi,” 44. Ivan Kliun “C Cvet, Forma i prrostranstvo v iskusstve i ich vzaimootnoscheniie,” MS S (published in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 3776–382), 378.

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which he intended to demonstrate the properties of colors and how they interact with different forms. Kliun continued to edit and add to these tables over time. According to Kliun, “It is necessary to create eidetic tables with simple forms in which the forms are either in harmony or disharmony with each other in terms of their psychological effect. . . . Such tables will demonstrate the nonobjective character of painting or even be a helpful tool for handicrafts.”66 Kliun’s manuscripts contain references to a number of different color tables, though only a handful of them have survived: Table 1 from 1942 titled “On the Problem of Composition: Constructing Images Based on Decorative and Organic Principles”67 (see Plate 4.4), another table from the same year titled “Color Gradation,”68 and the color/form study on a black wheel (Plate 4.3). Two pages of diagrams included in Kliun’s essay The Problem of Color in Painting 69 illustrate the arguments he makes. Sheet V shows the earlier study of color and form on a black wheel and several overlapping colored forms that are identical with several figures in Table 1 (Plate 4.4). Sheet VI features two color scales consisting of stripes, each with seventeen warm hues (from amber, red, pink, brown and ocher to greenish yellow) and thirteen cold hues (from gray, blue, light blue and dark blue to violet).70 Kliun’s attempts were not the only ones to investigate the correspondences between colors and forms in Russia between 1911 and 1925. There is one color diagram in Kandinsky’s treatise On the Spiritual in Art that shows a yellow triangle, a red square, and a blue circle. Kandinsky believed that color could enhance or mute the qualities of a form. In his estimation, bright, warm colors make a stronger impact in pointed shapes, such as yellow when presented inside a triangle. Blue, on the other hand, which tends to create a sense of depth, reaches its full potential inside a circle, while red comes to full effect in a square.71 Based on his experiments with colored forms at GINKhUK, Matiushin concluded that “the warm end of the color spectrum (from red to yellow) tends towards wide, circular forms, while the cold end (from yellowish green to violet) tends to create hard angles and edges. Warm colors, for 66

Kliun, “Cvet, Forma i prostranstvo v iskusstve i ich vzaimootnoscheniie,” 380. There seem to have been plans for table number two, but it is unknown whether it was ever created. 68 Russian: “Gradacii tonov,” Ufa 1942, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 69 See Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi.” 70 Ibid., attachment Vand VI. 71 Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 46–47. 67

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example, emphasize the continuity of the circle’s curve, while the cold ones on the surface of the circle tend to start forming sharp angles and straight lines.”72 Kliun attempted to determine the correspondence between particular colors and forms and to develop universal rules of painting based on his personal ideas and numerous surveys. Not without some irony, Kliun claimed: The most important things that we perceive in our lives are color and form. We experience the world through them. When I investigate color and form, I proceed from purely subjective notions, and from there I reach objective conclusions. And so it is that one artist encloses the primary color red in a round form, while another uses red in a square form instead. . . . In everyone’s view, yellow should be used inside an equilateral triangle. Of course, it depends on which primary color the artist is working from, which will impact if the change in the triangular form goes in the direction of blue (green) or red (orange). . . . Many people claim that the circle is best suited to red, but a few believe the circle works with blue. I conclude from this that the discrepancies in the views of particular individuals are only evidence of the quirks of their psychophysical makeup, which some psychiatrist should look into.73

Kliun admittedly does not list the names of specific artists, but it is almost certain he was referring to Matiushin with “red in a round form” and to Malevich—and possibly Kandinsky—with “red in a square form.” At the end of the 1920s, Kliun created a study of color and form on a black wheel with ten colors in total (see Plate 4.3). He then assigned ten geometrical shapes that he felt would best bring out each color’s full potential. Kliun believed that arranging the colors in a wheel, starting from warm red and moving towards cold blue, made it possible to illustrate both the polarity of colors and forms as well as the varying intensity of color.74

72 Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin, Zakonomernost’ izmeniaemosti cvetovych sochetanii. Spravochnik po cvetu, ed. Dmitrii Aronov (Moscow: 2007), 24. Wünsche, Kunst & Leben, 237. 73 Kliun, “Bespredmetnoe iskusstvo. Obschie polozheniia,” in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 276–277. 74 Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 45.

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Kliun described his color wheel as follows: The colors inside different forms create opposing pairs in this wheel in that the warm and intense colors are positioned directly opposite the cold, calm ones. As far as the choice of forms assigned to the colors is concerned, I came up with them over the course of many years and verified them (statistically) with the help of the surveys. They are also the result of observing the work of other artistic colleagues.75

Kliun’s chromolithograph shows a yellow triangle, which contradicts Matiushin’s work but corresponds to Kandisky’s study of color and form. The case is just the opposite with the red circle, which is blue in the case of Kandinsky and red for Matiushin. Kliun’s color–form wheel differs from Kandinsky’s table in On the Spiritual in Art as well as from the results of Matiushin’s experimental investigations at GINKhUK. 76 It represents a synthesis of Kliun’s own observations and reflection, Matiushin’s theory of color and form, and Kandinsky’s empirical studies. And even though Kliun’s findings differed from those of Kandinsky and Matiushin, the basic idea driving their work remained the same, namely that color influences our psyche and requires a certain form that enables it to have the greatest impact. In 1942, Kliun prepared a comprehensive table of colors and forms (see Plate 4.4). According to Kliun, the composition can be organic and decorative. An organically constructed composition is one in which colors and forms are logically combined with and closely related to each other. One of Kliun’s partly unpublished manuscripts Composition and Texture 77 contains explanations of his color-form tables, but does not specify which ones the artist meant. Kliun’s descriptions and explanations largely correspond with the figures in this table, though some differ from the description provided. The colored forms numbered 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16– 23, 25–30, 35, 42, 46, and 57 depict what an organically constructed composition looks like.78 Decorative composition is constructed according to external aesthetic principles. The elements have no close relationship or connection to each 75

Ivan Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi. Tezisy doklada i stat’ja,” TS (unpublished), Nr. 632, the Khardziev archive, Amsterdam: 3. 76 Wünsche, Kunst & Leben, 187. 77 Kliun, “Kompoziciia i faktura.” 78 Ibid., 4. In the original Kliun’s MS, those numbers of figures or elements considered especially characteristic for each type of composition have been underlined. Author’s note.

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other in terms of decorative composition. Figures 1, 3, 6, 7, 14, 38, 39, 40, 37, and 45 in Table 1 (Plate 4.4) are examples of this. The composition that combines both color-form types is called a “mixed composition” and can be seen in Figures 5, 13, 37, 45, and 47.79 Kliun’s table is also meant to visually demonstrate stasis, dynamism, and movement in the composition. In Kliun’s view, the forms and colors in a “static composition” evoke a harmonious calm and sublime lyricism, such as found in Figures 1, 2, 10, 11, 16, 24, 27, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 51, and 53–60.80 The composition’s dynamism, however, is something that the viewer should feel rather than see. Movement is created in the composition by placing forms in one direction or another, as one can find in Figures 4, 8, 25–28, 29–33, 47, 48, 46. In Figures 4 and 25–28, the forms move toward the viewer. Figure 8 (see Plate 4.4) shows a quick, downwards-plunging movement, and, in Figure 30, movement to the right is prevented by the blue form.81 Kliun discusses the subject of balance in composition, which can be created by combining different forms and colors, such as Figures 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 24, 27, 33, 34, 35, 41, 46, and 47–49 demonstrate.82 Kliun goes even further and explains “dissonant” and “harmonious” combinations between colors and forms in the composition. All of these concepts are demonstrated by Figures in Table I (see Plate 4.4). Kliun explained that creating contrasts when combining forms and harmonious colors enhances the impression of all that has been seen and heard. He also stated that the best artists used such contrasts in their immortal works. The masters of the Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Veronese, and Van Dyck, all used color contrasts in addition to harmonious colors.83 Kliun drew a distinction between the contrast created between and among primary colors and the contrast of complementary colors. In the table, Figures 6, 15, 9, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35, 38, 45, 47, and 58 demonstrate the contrast created by the juxtaposition of primary colors, whereas Figures 5, 10, 24, 45, 46, 53, and 55 depict the contrast of complementary colors. However, numbers 53, 55, 24, and 46 are not in

79

Kliun, “Kompoziciia i faktura,” 4. Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 80

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accord with this explanation, which suggests that perhaps another table was created but did not survive. These guidelines show how serious Kliun’s efforts to create a grammar of painting were—and how meticulous and detailed he was in documenting his studies and investigations. Kliun was aware that his research on colors and forms lacked a scientific basis and, in fact, frequently referred to this problem in his writings. Nevertheless, he did not completely exclude the possibility of using a scientific approach in investigating the elements of art. Kliun wrote: Concerning my tables, I do not claim that the nature of my method is absolutely scientific; rather, I allow my perception to guide me. I believe that a strictly scientific approach to art—especially a mechanical approach—kills art. Nevertheless, I do not reject a scientific approach to art. I think that such an approach will be possible in the distant future when the appropriate devices or instruments for measuring the power of color, saturation and the effects of their differences on the human psyche are invented.84

The lack of such instruments did not stop Kliun from looking for different ways to create a kind of manual or grammar of painting that outlines the basics of color and form theory and their incorporation into composition. In my view, Kliun’s tables with color and form combinations represent more of a methodological guide for artistic handicrafts and industrial design since they demonstrate the wide variety of possible ways to combine forms with colors without attempting to broach any kind of deeper meaning or substantive aspect. In his essay The Problem of Color in Painting, Kliun summarized his findings on color after many years of investigation and research into the topic. Based on these findings, he posited the following axioms: 1. Each color requires a form that best suits its features.85 2. Every change in color causes a change in form and vice versa. Each color can alter its main form when influenced by neighboring colors and even take on its contrary form.86 3. Each paint has its own characteristic surface and depth, in addition to aspects that are dry, hard, velvety, and sharp. It has its own density as well.87 84

Kliun, “Cvet, forma i prostransvo“ in Rakitin and Sarabianov, Ivan Kliun, 379. Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 45. Author’s translation. 86 Ibid. Author’s translation. 85

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4. Many colors evoke a sense of warmth or cold. Viewers can only sense warm and cold colors in psychological, not physical terms. The association with fire and sunlight means that red and yellow are among the warm colors, while blue, in contrast to them, is a cold color.88 5. The artist can combine colors in such a way that it suggests distance and depth. If forms have different colors but the same brightness—which is possible with glazing—they seem to exist on a single surface or plane. As soon as the colors take on different degrees of brightness, it creates the impression of varying depth.89

After reading numerous scientific treatises on color, Kliun came to this conclusion: Several color theories, as developed by physicists, persuade us that they are just loosely linked with art. Physics as an exact science researches color without any connection to form. On the other hand, for an artist, color is intrinsically tied to form. I found that even the simplest geometric form is closely related to a certain color. . . . Even color per se is treated differently by physicists and painters. The painter works with pigments and the physicist with spectral colors. Helmholtz also states that the combination of different color rays follows an entirely different set of rules than the combination of various dyestuffs.90

Conclusion As the quotes from Kliun’s manuscripts cited in this article demonstrate, Kliun sought to develop an art theory backed by science. More than that, he attempted to create a grammar for abstract painting. To this end, Kliun investigated the elements of art such as color, form, texture, light, space, and their principles of combination in order to illustrate which aspects of a work of art have an impact on viewers and their psyches. Kliun’s plan to create a practical grammar of painting for artists is most certainly an idea borrowed from Kandinsky, though one that Kliun pursued independently. Matiushin’s experiments with forms and colors at GINKhUK likewise had a decisive influence on the theoretical ideas Kliun developed in his writings. Kliun’s own findings differed from those of Matiushin, however, and he wrote many essays and manuscripts that outline the basic rules of design. In addition, he developed his own hypotheses and then attempted 87

Kliun, “Problema cveta v zhivopisi,” 46. Author’s translation. Ibid., 47. Author’s translation. 89 Ibid., 46. Author’s translation. 90 Ibid., 44. Author’s translation. 88

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to corroborate them with experiments and through various scholarly treatises. In the end, Kliun’s is an overlooked legacy that helped considerably shape the understanding of artistic design and the development of nonobjective art in Russia.

CHAPTER FIVE BARCELONA—PARIS— “NEW CUSCO”—MONTEVIDEO: THE ROUTES TO ROOTS OF JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCÍA’S SOUTH AMERICAN ABSTRACTION1 AARNOUD ROMMENS

In singling out Torres–García for attention . . . we should not be under any illusion that we are thereby penetrating the mysteries of South American art history. Torres–García was born in Montevideo in 1874, and he died there in 1949; yet his life as an artist traces the most familiar of modern scenarios—the scenario of exile.2

This is how Hilton Kramer assesses the importance of the work of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres–García (1874-1949). Looking back, Kramer attributes a lack to the painter’s œuvre: the deep and unfamiliar “mystery” Kramer deems essential to South American art is absent. In the end, Torres–García’s art and life are all too “familiar” as they resist the desire for the exotic the critic imposes upon art history for it to count as 1 This chapter reformulates some of the issues I address in greater detail in The Art of Joaquín Torres–García: Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2016). Furthermore, at the time of writing this text, the large retrospective curated by Luis Pérez–Oramas entitled Joaquín Torres–García: The Arcadian Modern (October 25, 2015–February 2016) at the Museum of Modern Art was not yet open to the public. I only recently had a chance to peruse the exhibition catalog also edited by Luis Pérez–Oramas (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015). Unfortunately, time was lacking to incorporate some of the insights formulated in this important publication. 2 Hilton Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956–1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 256; emphasis mine.

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distinctively South American. This is a contradictory demand: to be “authentic,” South American art must testify to a somehow reassuring mysteriousness, an enigma that is paradoxically also a transparent sign of its belonging to a specific art with its own history. Torres–García’s work fails to pay homage to the “touristic” fantasy of an exotic art tradition that is easily decipherable as holding a secret that only “true” South American art can articulate. Since Torres–García’s work has nothing to teach us about South America, Kramer cannot but conclude that it is but a pale imitation of the “true” historical vanguard, never transcending its “profound debt to the European avant-garde,” a debt which is “only too obvious.” 3 Exiling Torres–García from South American art history, Kramer subsumes the Uruguayan painter within European art history, since, as the text goes on to explain, Torres–García was not as daring as Pablo Picasso and certainly not as principled as Piet Mondrian. His art is supposedly an art of hesitant vacillation between the major trends of the European avant-gardes: Torres–García dabbled in so many avant-garde styles that he became master—let alone author—of none. What makes this misrecognition doubly ironic is that Torres–García himself—contrary to Kramer’s judgment—believed he was unearthing the deep, lost “mysteries” specific to South America. His writing is a testament to the conviction that his artwork was restituting a long forgotten origin, a lost aesthetic that had been destroyed through colonization. He would baptize this recovered “mystery of South American art” Constructive Universalism and claim authorship. In counterpoint, while using the art of Torres–García as a heuristic, I suggest that the real illusion is the illusion of hidden depths, the fantasy that there is a mystery—a deep, originary structure—in need of deciphering. What is important in Torres–García’s visual work is that it shows that every restitution is an act of construction: the work of art enacts the artifice of origin, an artifice which is retrospectively disavowed in the artist’s philosophical writings. That is to say, in order to uphold the unity of his neo-classical edifice, Torres–García’s discourse obscures the fact that restitution is not the restoration of a long lost origin but the assemblage of a contingent present out of the ruins of an imaginary past projected onto a utopian future. Moreover, what I hope to make clear is that this artifice is only possible through the “scenario” of exile and return, through the artist’s nomadic experience, with the latter amounting to a

3

Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde, 256.

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form of “border gnosis.”4 Torres–García’s dream of a “School of the South” arose out of a collage of a range of practices borrowed from the Schools of Paris and Barcelona, only to be reimported to South America under the label Constructive Universalism. In that sense, the familiar scenario displays an unscripted plot twist, i.e., the artist’s unforeseen return, after a long detour, to his native Montevideo, which he then proclaimed to be the birthplace of an authentic, yet repressed Pan-American, abstract art and “abstract spirit.” It is this story of the artifice of the ancestral abstraction within Constructive Universalism that needs to be told.

Diasporic abstraction However, what was the Uruguayan painter’s “scenario of exile”? To gain insight into Torres–García’s many arrivals and departures, I will start with a brief biographical sketch. Joaquín Torres–García was born in Montevideo in 1874. His mother was Uruguayan; his father was Catalan and had emigrated to Uruguay at the age of nineteen. Exile ran in the family, so to speak: out of economic hardship the family left Montevideo in 1891 and returned to the father’s ancestral home in Barcelona. Torres– García received his formal artistic education at the Academia de Belles Artes and at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc. He became a prominent member of Noucentisme, the Catalan movement rejecting the perceived excesses of modernism in favor of a neo-classical style that continued the legacy of Mediterranean, Latin culture. At that time, Torres–García painted pastoral and allegorical murals in a neo-classical fresco style in line with this regionalist, anti-modern ideology—as in the mural for the Catalan Government entitled Eternal Catalonia of 1913.5 Disenchanted with certain political shifts and turning his eye to the modern, pulsating city, Torres–García broke with Noucentisme. “I am the enemy of all tradition, of whatever kind,”6 he would even write, echoing the polemical stance of futurism. In 1917, he met fellow Uruguayan painter Rafael Barradas who encouraged him to embrace Vibrationist painting, accentuating the movement and dynamic of a contemporary 4

Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5 An image of the work can be found in the online Catalogue Raisonné, edited by Cecilia de Torres and Susanna V. Temkin. “La Catalunya Eterna, 1913 (1913.02)” http://www.torresgarcia.com/catalogue/entry.php?id=277. 6 Qtd. in Eric Jardí, Torres García (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1973), 87.

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Barcelona in the midst of modernization. Precarity forced Torres–García and his family to try their luck in the United States where they moved in 1920 with the intention of setting up a toy business while the artist would further his experiments in painting the frantic rhythms of urban life, transposing Vibrationism to the New World. However, his stay in New York was shortlived. Already alienated as he hardly spoke any English, disaster struck—the toy warehouse burnt down—which hastened the family’s decision to move to Italy. They first settled in Genoa only to relocate to Livorno a year later. Troubled by the rise of fascism in Italy, the family moved once more, to the French coastal town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. From there, the family temporarily ended their pilgrimage: in 1926 the Torres–García family arrived in Paris, and would remain there for eight years. Before coming to Paris, Torres–García had had little contact with the avant-garde. This new uprooting synchronized his work with the dominant avant-garde iconographies. As Torres–García put it: “I learned much in Paris, and it was there that I was formed.”7 However, his approach to the avant-garde was always idiosyncratic; he always allowed the tension of his own visual research—the friction between figuration and abstraction—free rein. This accounts for his uneasy relation with geometric abstraction; although he felt close to the work of Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg, he was never at ease with an art form in which the figural would have no place. His refusal to choose between figuration—which was identified with surrealism at the time—and abstraction—in the form of neoplasticism —is indicative of his exilic perspective. In fact, it was in 1932 in Paris that he found a name for this exilic poetics: Constructive Universalism (Universalismo Constructivo). The term indicates the aesthetic of the in-between; it names a receptiveness that allows one to be formed and reformed by otherness. Indeed, “it is there that I was formed”: form is a function of place, be it Montevideo, Barcelona, or anywhere the throw of the dice takes you. In Paris, the name Constructive Universalism amounted to a tactical move: it made Torres– García’s praxis legible by differentiating it from the hegemony of cubism, geometric abstraction, surrealism, and neoplasticism. However, his -ism did not have any followers here—it had no time to take root. With Paris feeling the effects of the Great Depression (1929–1939), the specter of poverty once again forced the Torres–García family to relocate. In 1932, they packed their belongings and headed to Madrid, but their stay there did not last long. Hesitating between Mexico and Uruguay, Torres–García 7

Jardí, Torres García, 117.

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made a final roll of the dice: in 1934, Torres–García and family returned to Montevideo.

Mapping mestizaje So, here we are. Aged sixty, and after an absence of forty-three years, Torres–García ends his prolonged European aesthetic education. It is over here that Constructive Universalism would be reframed through the paradigm of pre-Columbian art in an effort to garner legitimacy. This resolute turn to the South mythologized Torres–García’s aesthetic credo: Constructive Universalism became shorthand for the return to indigenous, archaic forms specific to America. Writing from Montevideo, Torres– García now sees the anti-mimetic art he encountered in Paris not as something new or radical. Instead, he rereads the European abstract avantgarde as the rediscovery by the conquistador of America’s originary abstract tradition, a tradition Europe had eradicated through colonization. Torres–García thus inverts the art historical canon and does so in terms of a return of the repressed: After the violent erasure of tradition by the “decadence” of figuration and mixed, baroque colonial styles, the South must set itself the task of restoring the lost, classical purity of (mythic) abstraction. It must cast out overly figurative, “narrative” art because such art is pars pro toto for European colonial violence and the “false culture” it engendered: [E]n un momento dado [la cultura autóctona] queda detenida, en su normal evolución, por los invasores. Que es como decir que queda enterrada por cerca de cuatro siglos. Pues bien: creo que si la cultura autóctona ha de seguir, hay que tomarla allí donde quedó, haciendo caso omiso de la superposición de una falsa cultura que fue formándose luego, falsa en el sentido de que no pudo ser más que un trasplante. Y esa cosa híbrida (pues aquí se ha mezclado y deformado) es a lo que nosotros llamamos nuestra cultura. . . . [A]quí tenía que producirse un verdadero renacimiento. No hay duda de que contribuimos a él; pero también arquólogos e historiadores, artistas y poetas, al exhumar, con un verdadero entusiasmo, esa verdadera América enterrada. . . . He ahí, pues, una fundamental razón para cortar con Europa, tratando de continuarla, y también para repudiar esta bastarda cultura que aquí se ha formado. . . . Porque el indio fue geómetra. Y esto quiere decir cultura . . . debemos seguir la gran Tradición del Hombre, pero en esta modalidad indoamericana.8 8

Joaquín Torres–García, “El Nuevo Arte de América,” in Universalismo Constructivo, 2 (Madrid: Alianza Forma, 1984), 822; emphasis in original. This

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Such is the logic of Torres–García’s discourse after his turn to the South: his books, manifestos, lectures, and other writings subscribe to this metaphysics of originary, pre-contact purity—which he refers to through the concept of Indo–America—proscribing what he calls the “decadence” of “imported styles” and the “bastard culture” he encountered upon his return in Montevideo. Since Uruguay lacked a monumental indigenous tradition of its own, this ideal of abstraction had to be located elsewhere— in short, it had to be “imported,” which, of course, already points to the inconsistency of any “rhetoric of purity.” 9 In any case, Torres–García identified the purest form of abstraction with pre-contact Inca and pre-Inca culture. In Inca ruins, he saw harmony, the Divine Proportion, symmetry, purity, and the will to order of an Apollonian civilization that would collapse through the degeneracy of mestizaje. This is indeed the discursive home—or rather, fortress—he built for Andean abstraction, fixing it in place through the neo-classical Noucentisme discourse he had assimilated in Barcelona, which he had never truly abandoned: it traveled with him throughout his exile, predisposing his eye to making the world legible as structure, as instinctively heeding rational laws which reflected an IndoAmerican metaphysics of symmetry. Finally returning to its ancestral home, Constructive Universalism was to produce new works attesting to this forgotten “Abstract Spirit” and act as the catalyst for the Renaissance of what Torres–García called authentic, pre-Columbian “Abstract Man.” However, this entire theoretical edifice crumbles when confronted with the irreducible mestizaje of his own visual experiments. Metaphysical nostalgia is inverted by plastic works that testify to the actuality of postColumbian heterogeneity, bespeaking a poetics of ambiguity. can be translated as: “At a certain moment, [indigenous culture] was interrupted in its normal evolution by the invaders. That is to say, it was buried for almost four centuries. I believe that if autochthonous culture is to continue, we must take it up where it had been left off, ignoring the superposition of a false culture that was formed later, false in the sense that it could be no more than a transplant. And that hybrid thing (for it has been mixed and become deformed) is what we call our culture. . . . Here a true renaissance had to occur. There is no doubt that we are contributing to it; but also archaeologists and historians, artists and poets, who exhume with real enthusiasm the real America buried underneath. . . . This then is a fundamental reason to cut off Europe, trying to continue it, and to repudiate this bastard culture that has formed here. . . . For the Indian was a geometer. And this means culture. . . . We must continue the great Tradition of Man, but in this IndoAmerican modality.” 9 Mark Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Figure 5.1. Jooaquín Torres–G García, South America’s A Inverrted Map. Ink drawing d on paper, reprodduced in Circuloo y cuadrado no o. 1, May 19366. Image copyrig ght Museo Torres Garcíaa, Montevideo.

The Inveerted Map is one such space in whichh the image refuses r to mirror the logical field of o Torres–Garrcía’s words. (Fig. 5.1) Th he gesture seems simpple enough: draw d a map of o South Ameerica, and theen turn it upside downn. At least, thiis is what the title t of the draawing, Inverteed Map of South Ameriica would havve one believee. Yet, the imaage is reluctan nt to give in to the connfidence of itss caption. It iss only a seemiing inversion, since the gridlines off the map are intact, while all the cipheers are in their readily decodable pplace, with thee letters “Améérica del Sur” still in their reassuring upright alphhabetical ordder. Similarly y, the numbeers—the latittude and longitude of Montevideoo—do not deemand any aw wkward gestu ure to be made legiblee. The points of the compass, north, sout uth, east, and west w have changed plaace, that is to say, s their nam mes—not theirr positions—h have been substituted, as have the names n of both h the tropics. Yet, at the saame time, our bodily, intuitive spatial sense of up, u down, leftt, and right arre now in open contraadiction withh cartographiic conventionn, and its customary c conceptual aalignments: a sense of verrtigo follows the realizatio on of this strange disconnect. As if to parody thee Gaussian cooordinate systeem, South

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is now located on top, and North is located below—the compass now points south in defiance to the decrees of the magnetic North, and both tropics have changed place—while the map still insists on the precision (lat 34º41’ S, long 56º W) it offers to an inverted world. The arrow–icon is expressly oriented against the movement of the reading eye: we must move against the alphabet to make the image intelligible, even in its disorientation. Furthermore, the scriptural economy with its alphanumerical law of decoding runs counter to the rhythm of the sun. As we move to read “the movement of the earth” (movimiento de la tierra) as we must, from west to east, we thus engage in something unnatural, something at odds with the depicted, “real” movement of the earth. The map suggests that there is a counter-tradition that moves with the earth, a tradition following the movimiento de la tierra contradicting the movement of the alphabetical eye, the eye of colonial inscription. This is a nostalgic image longing for a time before the South was exiled from pure ritual time, the time wherein geometry, the cosmic, and abstraction were still integrated: “el indio fue geómetra.” Defiantly, the earth rotates against time; the future is a progression backwards towards the first rising of the sun in a movement that unfolds towards the origin of time, located in a precise point indicated by the numbers. Montevideo is the “New Cusco,” the new omphalos—the new “navel of the world”—of a South American renaissance rooted in Amerindian abstraction. The old axis mundi is transplanted to Montevideo. The smaller arrow indicates that it is here, in Montevideo, that a new art will arise; it is here where an absolute beginning, a new childhood of humanity will dawn to outshine the Untergang des Abendlandes. 10 The figure of the South (the anti-North) is in constant proximity to the pictograph of the sun, ensuring that America is the continent of its perpetual rising, as a space where the sun never sets, in counterpoint to the 10

In Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 127. Unruh notes the “importance of European and North American thinkers with New World concerns” for artists trying to formulate an aesthetics expressive of South American specificity, regional identity, so as to effect artistic independence from the hegemonic center and counter the image of the South as merely a paltry imitation of a grand, authentic original. In order to further legitimate avant-garde undertakings while grounding this praxis in terms of national identity, artists in the South were drawn to the thought of Oswald Spengler’s (1918–1922) The Decline of the West, and in his wake “Count Hermann Keyserling, . . . [and] José Ortega y Gasset. In addition, Ortega’s journal Revista de Occidente circulated widely in Latin America and played a critical role in the disseminating of Spengler’s ideas about the future significance of non-European cultures.”

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west, perpetually enshrined in darkness, living off the reflected, borrowed light of its glow. Following Torres–García’s logic, this “borrowed light” has recently become manifest, or rather, has been revealed to Europe under the guise of the avant-garde’s discovery of abstraction, which had always already been in place in pre-Columbian America, prior to the fall of figuration, the contamination of the purity of planar abstraction inaugurated by European colonization and the subsequent process of creolization. The map thus encodes a nostalgia for a mythical time prior to the disenchantment through the homogeneous, empty time of the clock. This, at least, is Torres–García’s utopian projection. However, the apparently clear-cut nostalgia for a noncolonial, uninterrupted past—as precondition for a new, “abstract” future—runs up against the equivocations of the visual. Marked with the precision of Cartesian coordinates (lat 34º41’ S, long 56º W)—and the implied history of circumnavigation as well as an entire colonial epistemological apparatus— the mythic omphalos of the New World engenders a cosmic-cartographic composite in which the gesture of drawing by hand is an ironic commentary on both the failure of science to capture meaning as well as the futility of a return to cosmological time by showing it can only ever amount to the aestheticization—the mythologizing—of the political. The hand-drawn, the traits, the marks, the swirls of the line, the hesitations: the nonsemiotic traces insinuate themselves within the idiom of geometric projection, exhibiting a playfulness that distorts the strictness of Western geography and cartographic visual literacy—indeed, do we not know what America looks like?— as the sun and moon pictograms give the image a certain childlike naivety, or disobedience, if you will. One could indeed read this in terms of a central tenet of Torres–García’s Constructive Universalism, i.e. the association of the child and the youth of humanity with South American abstraction. At the same time, the geometric idiom adds an ironic twist to the notion of absolute “origin”: (0,0) is a cartographic convention that is the condition for the possibility of the “applied science” of global positioning. The swirls of ink thus harbor an uncanny echo by dragging along a history of cartographic practices that facilitated the conquest the Inverted Map seems to want to “regress beyond” so to speak. More precisely, the fantasy of a cosmic temporality is undercut through the actuality of visual association, and the traces of colonial time it reveals. There are two specific loci of visual analogy that suggest an alternate, mestizo genealogy for Torres–García’s Inverted Map. This further underlines the hybridity of the map in its mixture of the cartographic with the cosmological. As the heir to the conceptual model of the Coricancha

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temple (Fig. 5.2), drawn around 1613–1615 by chronicler Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua (from his Relación de anteguedades deste Reyno del Pirú), the pictogram of the sun in The Inverted Map is shorthand for Father Inti—the Inca sun god—while the moon pictogram is a direct descendant of the Inca moon Goddess, Mama Quilla.11 This link makes the Inverted Map a palimpsest of hybrid IndoHispanic visibilities and legibilities, precisely what Torres–García would not allow into the strict confines of his discursive field. This visual association undermines Torres–García’s fantasy of a “new beginning”; it reveals that the beginning is always already underway. In fact, Torres– García’s map is a continuation of an aesthetic of mestizaje, not only by superimposing cosmic cycles of duration onto modern, Cartesian spacetime. The map also invokes Pachacuti Yamqui’s “text” as an imagetext, playing off the tension between writing and drawing. Or rather, it puts the carefully handcrafted letters on a plane of continuity with drawing, a plane that renders the distinction between iconicity and glottography indiscernible. Through this visual association, the words movimiento de la tierra become legible as cryptic indictments: the movement of the earth as indicated by the arrow–icon—pointing to the atavistic, diurnal life–rhythm of (the fantasy of) pre-Columbian man—running counter to the alphanumerical, linear eye imposed through colonialism, gestures towards a digital, abstract—rather than alphanumerical and analogical—counterspace. The map forces one to think against the alphabet, and imagine Inca space as one where “there was no writing, as defined by sixteenth-century European standards.”12 Yet, to do so one must inhabit the conflicting in11 Sebastián Lopez notes that “the map includes what Torres–García knew about the art and culture of the Incas. In the upper part, it has a half moon on the right and the sun on the left, while in the center is the constellation of the Southern Cross. Torres–García’s fantasy seemed to be inspired by the relations between the forces of nature in the temple of Korikancha in Cuzco which the chronicler, Santacruz Pachacuti, depicted in circa 1615. In it we see Urcurara (the constellation of Orion) at the top; on the right hand side is Q(ui)lla (the moon); on the left we find Inti (the sun) and in the center, the site of Viracocha pachayacha (Viracocha was the creator of the world), Torres–García replaced him with the inverted map of South America” (Lopez, “The Founding of the South,” 136–137). These sources were all colonial sources, since the Inca only adopted alphanumerical writing after the conquest. 12 Thomas B. F. Cummins, “Representation in the 16th Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca,” in Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, eds. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 282.

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between of mestizaje, of performative contradiction: to read traces of the nonalphabetical by following the letter of the text.

Figure 5.2. Juan de Santa Cruz, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, [Cosmological Drawing]. Ink on paper. Relación de anteguedades deste Reyno del Pirú, 1613. MSS/3169 (h.144v), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

A similar antinomy holds for Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s drawing Pontifical Mundo, part of his Primer nueva corónico y bien gobierno

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(1613), 13 which is the other space of resemblance that breaks open Constructive Universalism’s logical field.14 Inca art, owing to the fact that “the overall Andean concept of representation is based on geometric abstraction” 15 was all but “invisible” to Western eyes disciplined in mimetic visual literacy.16 Mimesis, as the bias of legibility toward pictorial narrativity, disallows the possibility of meaningful abstraction. Inca art, with its enigmatic reworking of stone outcrops, the integration of the landscape into a continuum of artifice and nature, the variety and structural modulations of its masonry, the patterning of abstract motifs on textiles, pottery and the overall “abstract mood” of its approach—all this refinement in compositional, structural relations went largely unnoticed to the colonizer or was dismissed as merely “ornamental.” On the whole, Ayala’s imagery mobilizes perspective, illusionism, and figuration in order to make post-conquest Inca life intelligible. The First New Chronicle and Good Governance is thus a locus of inscription and “in-visioning” within the Western scriptural-pictorial canon since “all the European compositional techniques are brought into play so as to suggest place,

13

An online image is available on the website of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, with reference: Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, El otabo inga, vira cocha inga (The Eighth Inka, Viracocha Inka). GKS 2232 4to, Primer nueva corónico y bien gobierno (1615), 106. http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/ 42/es/image/?open=id2683831. 14 As Paul Vandenbroeck observes, “with this drawing, Torres–García unconsciously repeats the vision of the Indian chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala from around the year 1600: in a sketch of the world (‘mundo’), he depicts the sun above the Andes with Cuzco and symbols of the four ‘suyu’, and then Spain at the bottom. There is a superscription which reads: ‘Las lndias del Peru en lo alto de España’ (The Indians of Peru above Spain), and below: ‘Castilla en lo abajo de las Indias’ (Castile under the Indians),” eds. Paul Vandenbroeck and M. Catherine de Zegher, America, Bride of the Sun: 500 Years Latin America and the Low Countries (Antwerp: Imschoot, 1991), 316. 15 Cummins, “Representation in the 16th Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca,” 202. 16 Undergoing its own profound shift in notions of discernibility, from medieval symbolism to Renaissance naturalism, the West, through the device of perspective—and its aura of scientificity—invested more and more energy in the representation of the phenomenal as the guarantee of truth and fidelity. Visibility was increasingly stipulated in terms of resemblance to what it construed as the “observable world,” while charging visual art with the task of illusionism, of producing “life-like” representations with a narrative, dramatic core with geometry at the service of representation.

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space, time, and event.” 17 The pre-conquest tradition of geometric abstraction is rerouted through figuration: it is the only detour available through which the “ruins,” the minimal traces of a once vital abstraction can be made to reverberate, however faintly, in the background. Poma’s image is a composite of heterogeneous elements: a collage-image of abstraction and figuration, “retrofitted” from the scraps of an ancient cosmology attuning to a new, unfamiliar setting. Torres–García’s Inverted Map exhibits a similar, complex field of tension and provokes a reflection on the contingency of spatial organization and the instability of such basic, seemingly transparent terms as “up” and “down,” North and South. As “the Northern Hemisphere has a different group of celestial constellations than the Southern, thereby imparting different patterns of orientation,”18 it has misrepresented Inca cosmology because of the naturalization of its own perspective. “What for [European and North American researchers] was respectively, ‘under’ and ‘over,’ was precisely the reverse for the Incas. Ethnocentrism, thus, can emanate from a projection of one's own sense of ‘space’ upon that of another culture.” 19 The Inverted Map can thus be seen as the belated registration, an after-image of constellations of intelligibility clashing to the point of disorientation: North and South are superimposed to such an extent that the pre-colonial and post-colonial become indiscernible. Torres–García’s map enacts the vertigo upon losing one’s bearing (perder el norte), the paradox of being at a loss even after having found one’s objective (señalar el norte). The South has truly become a North, no longer able to provide a fixed point of reference. The “lesson” of the map culminates in a crowning irony: North and South, so it seems, are Western impositions, and are not grounded in Inca cosmology: The South truly was the invention of the hegemonic North. The Inca only knew East and West as fixed positional points, while North and South were directly related to the body. To quote César Paternosto, “the Incas recognized only two orientations: the east, anti, the rising sun; and the west, konti, the setting sun. The Incas lacked any word for ‘north’ or ‘south,’ which were designated by known geographical directions: ‘north,’ for example, was ‘the road to Quito.’”20 Instead of South “as opposed to” North then, the 17 Cummins, “Representation in the 16th Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca,” 201. 18 Vandenbroeck and de Zegher, America, Bride of the Sun, 316. 19 Ibid. 20 César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, trans. Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 10.

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contingent chiasm of word and image: South is North and North is South, and always the twain shall meet. The Inverted Map upturns Torres– García’s claim to purity: it performs that “hybrid thing.” “Deformed,” it charts a “bastard culture.” The map is a diagnostic image of modernity as it desires an end to alienation—an end to the exile of humanity from being at home in the world—and cannot fully mute the impurities of the herenow nor the reverberations of coloniality. The Inverted Map is the simultaneous closure of the nostalgic utopia it opens up.

Scrapbook aesthetics: The birth of American abstraction at the Trocadéro Overall, Torres–García’s visual work embodies what Serge Gruzinski dubs the “mestizo mind.” Mestizaje is not a stable compound; it is the volatile co-existence of contradiction. The Inverted Map is archaic and avant-garde, atavistic and futurist. Hybridity is not about sublation or fusion: it marks a polemical space opened up by contradiction; it is centrifugal. This anarchic movement is what Torres–García consistently disavows in his texts, and his discourse is a means to obscure the “provenance” of his insights, yet his images always bring into view an unruly movement his discourse of purity cannot contain. The visual layering of the map refers back to the image of abstraction that Torres– García transposed to Montevideo. Against his own performative dictum— proclaimed without the slightest hint of irony—that “pasó la época del coloniaje y la importación,” 21 a cessation of which Constructive Universalism would constitute the first example, his own philosophy of art was in fact the accommodation of a complex model interweaving the European discourse on primitivism with geometric abstraction so as to elevate the Indo-American into a tectonic paradigm—the aesthetic philosophy he propounded upon his return was the crystallization of studies undertaken in Europe. This process of absorption proved the necessary condition for the construction of his idea of abstraction, an idea rooted in the epistemic undertakings of ethnography and archeology concomitant with the vogue for primitive art in the European centers of the avant-garde. His stay in Paris, with his brief embrace of art nègre, was seminal in the conception of authentic Indo-American art he would bring home. This image was founded on dominant discourses on primitivism which he projected onto pre-Columbian America. In fact, Torres–García’s 21

Torres–García, “La Escuela del Sur,” 195.

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“understanding of ‘primitivism’ was not particularly original and more or less specific to the period. Comparable interpretations are found in Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro’s Primitive Negro Sculpture (1926) and Georges Henri Luquet’s l’Art primitif (1930).” 22 In the context of Montevideo, the pre-Columbian model was not “native” by any means; Torres–García fashioned an image of authenticity according to his own doctrinal system which he then presented as the only logical and truly indigenous option possible. “The epoch of colonialism and importation is over”? Given the exilic routes of Torres–García’s artistic research, this dictum opposes its own practice. Constructive Universalism marks the start of a new epoch of importation. The Incaic omphalos was artificially produced: having had time to incubate in Paris for the first few years as a patchwork of texts, readings, photos, and museum research, Constructive Universalism was subsequently reimported to the “homeland.” The map transposes Cusco to Montevideo; Cusco, imported from Peru—since Uruguay was “lacking” in a monumental indigenous artistic tradition—is overlaid onto Montevideo, but what had truly been transposed is the Musée d’Ethnographie (soon to be relocated to the present-day Musée de l’Homme) housed in the Trocadéro Palace in Paris—that almost mythical place of origin imbuing Pablo Picasso—amongst many others—with Torres–García’s own primitivist predilection. The museum was an eclectic Wunderkammer filled to the nook with colonial artifacts, the spoils of civilization and missionary zeal, housing a collection of “idolatrous” images kept at a safe distance from their “pagan” places of origin. It was here that Torres– García encountered “the early stages of cultural development, which he saw as representing the childhood of man and mankind; their spontaneous expression based on intuition, their manner of capturing an abstract geometry in nature, and their rudimentary abstract style.” 23 Indeed, the ethnographic museum of the Trocadéro was of paramount importance to Torres–García’s formulation of Constructive Universalism. It was at the Trocadéro and the 1928 exhibition The Ancient Arts of the Americas held at the Museum of Decorative Arts where Torres–García discovered preColumbian art and its geometric visual language in the first place. This would later allow him to read geometric abstraction as part of an ancient Andean tectonic paradigm rather than a form of European avant-garde experimentation. From this perspective, Constructive Universalism can be seen as a form of “ethnographic abstraction,” comparable to what James 22 23

Margit Rowell, Joaquín Torres–García (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2009), 119. Ibid.

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Clifford dubbed “ethnographic surrealism,” 24 where the “ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality.”25 In the case of Constructive Universalism, the ethnographic gaze is driven by the abstract geometric paradigm, and Torres–García sees himself as the heir and practitioner of the primitivist Andean paradigm he created. His absorption of the pictorial language of the replica housed at the Trocadéro of the pre-Inca Tiwanaku Gate of the Sun (Plate 5.1), for instance, illustrates the extent to which he framed himself as a “participant observer” of a “defamiliarized culture”—a culture he was intent on making ancestral. Labor, research, experimentation, the tracing of visual analogies and grounding them—making them legible—through a system of concepts are the material conditions of possibility for what Torres– García would consolidate into the paradigm for his “School of the South.” Through its complex routes, Constructive Universalism—the aesthetic philosophy grounded in ethnographic abstraction—is “border gnosis,” which Walter Mignolo defines as “knowledge from a subaltern perspective . . . conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial 24

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117–51. 25 Ibid., 121. Clifford emphasizes the importance of the Trocadéro for the development of the paradigm of the European avant-garde and primitive art, attaining an almost mythical status where the non-European could be encountered to revitalize European art. “Before 1930 the Trocadéro was a jumble of exotica. . . . Since the collection lacked an up-to-date scientific, pedagogical vision, its disorder made the museum a place where one could go to encounter curiosities, fetishized objects. It was here that Picasso, around 1908, began to make a serious study of l’art nègre” (Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 135). Important for the theory of abstraction is that Wilhelm Worringer did a great deal of his research at the Trocadéro for what was to become, in 1906, his doctoral dissertation Abstraction and Empathy (Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), viii–ix). After the reorganization of the museum in the early thirties by Georges Rivière, the chief curator, “the museum was becoming chic” (Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 136). The Trocadéro was also of paramount importance to Torres–García’s formulation of Constructive Universalism. His son Augusto was hired by the museum’s director, Paul Rivet, with whom Joaquin Torres–García had a cordial relationship, to “catalogue the pottery from the ancient Peruvian Nazca culture” (Rowell in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed. Joaquín Torres– García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood (Houston: Menil Foundation, 2009), 123. His work was thus instrumental in the transition of the museum as a grand cabinet of curiosities into a systemized collection.

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world system.” 26 However, once relocated to the periphery, Torres– García’s exilic knowledge aspires to become hegemonic in an uncanny replay of the logic of colonial inscription. By taking and superimposing fragments from the contemporary hegemonic cultural center, Torres– García reads the Andean “accent” back into a new practice: his own work is made legible as the anticipation of a renaissance of primordial abstraction. “It is Torres who explained primitive art to us, and not the other way round,” is how Juan Fló describes it. 27 I would go one step further: It is Torres–García who produced primitive art in co-production with his own work. Moreover, it is the alignment that is the work of art; the coordination of the pre-contact Andean work with a contemporary practice reveals the pre-Columbian as Constructive Universalism’s object of desire—the “accent” is artifice. This object only exists in discourse: as theory, Constructive Universalism is not isomorphic with its visual practice since Torres–García’s paintings radiate a self-otherness that his words cannot contain.

Conclusion: Baroque grids and scrapbook structures If, following Michel Foucault, we can agree that “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say,”28 this is especially the case for the relation between Torres–García’s words and his images. The relation between his scrapbooks called Estructuras, the series of paintings with the same name, and the 1935 book Estructura is a case in point. The multiplicity of the works—the plural Estructuras—can never be exhausted by the unitary concept Torres–García proposes—the singular Estructura that purportedly names the essence of Indo-American painting. I believe that the series of Estructura paintings amounts to a “baroquing” of the grid, creating counter-grids of mestizaje. These thick, sensuous grids stand in immediate counterpoint to Rosalind Krauss’s reduction of the grid as the “emblem of the modernist ambition within the visual arts” exemplifying “modern art’s will to silence.”29 26

Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 11. Juan Fló, “Torres–García in (and from) Montevideo,” in El taller Torres– García: The School of the South and Its Legacy, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), 30. 28 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 9. 29 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 9. 27

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Howeverr, as with the cartographic grid in the Innverted Map, these are structures thhat invite speech rather than t exorcisee it. Against the grid imagined ass constrictive stands the acctual grid as iindeterminate structure oscillating bbetween figuuration and abstraction. a C Consider the cover of Torres–Garccía’s book Estructura, E wh hich containss a reproducttion of a painting by tthe same nam me. (Fig. 5.3)

Figure 5.3. Joaquín Torrres–García, Estructura, E 19335. Oil on cardboard, c 79 x 62.2 cm.. Private collecttion, Montevideeo.

Cecilia B Buzio de Torrres notes thatt in the text oof Estructura, Torres– García d classified Rennaissance paintting as condemneed imitative figgurative art and decadent. . . . In contraddiction to the conventional idea that the more

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realistic the representation of the object, the more advanced the art, this classification promoted geometric art as a superior stage of development.30

Most commentators maintain that the grid-wall series are the most geometrically disciplined, abstract works Torres–García ever produced. However, this misses the disjunction between the title’s anchoring function and the image it claims to speak for. The notion of structure, with its overtone of anti-mimeticism is inverted through the return of painterly tradition, notably Renaissance techniques of representation. These grid images are not of the “highest austerity,” but demonstrate a playfulness in their engagement with tones and shading: painting becomes sculptural. There is an effect of volume—these are “painterly” 31 grids making figuration and abstraction bleed into one another. Structure is loosened through the evocation of stone, effecting a rhythmic oscillation in which ground and figure enter a space of undecidability. The works stage a complex shadow play between decadence and purity: the pre-Columbian is recast through the colonial, and vice versa. Against the reification of the grid as aniconic, anti-narrative structure, the grid displays its erudition: it quotes Inca walls and ruins, as well as their black-and-white photographic representations found in ethnographic museums, exhibits, and magazines at the time; Andean abstraction; the formal experimentation of avant-garde geometric abstraction; as well as the entire Western representational regime from the Renaissance onwards. In fact, these grid/wall paintings give body to a diagrammatical inquiry of indiscernibility, through the modus operandi of visual association. Whether or not these images stand in a continuous relation with perceptible reality is only of secondary importance. What matters is the radical artificialization of visibility and legibility through the work of analogy and the juxtaposition of artifacts. The grid/wall paintings enter into a vast constellation with sketches, archeological remnants, photographs, museum objects, and archival material, effecting a baroque ars memoria in which memory is constantly unfolding through material processes of montage and collage. It is worthwhile remembering that Torres–García never visited the preColumbian archaeological sites, even after his return to the South. He therefore composed these grid/wall images with the help of memory aids, 30

Cecilia Buzio de Torres, “The School of the South: The Asociación De Arte Constructivo, 1934–1942,” in El Taller Torres–García: The School of the South and Its Legacy, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 12. 31 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover, 1986).

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i.e. the Trocadéro museum and photographic documentation. Authenticity is not at issue: what this discloses is that origin is always a matter of artifice. His archival research and art praxis, his study of photographs and museum artifacts, the found objects in flea markets, and the art of montage and collage: the grid-walls are transmedial composites. The irony is that abstract spirit arose on the basis of a material tactic of visual association: in Paris, Torres–García had accumulated an immense network of analogies in his scrapbook Estructuras. The latter gathers a motley of photos, drawings, and notes which traverse continents and epochs, from primitive cave painting, Byzantine art, to geometric abstraction. It is the demon of analogy set loose, cutting and pasting in feverish mixed media. Torres– García tore images from magazines, newspapers, postcards, and even books. “Structure” names an anarchic technique of endless variation and not an originary, ideal form that would somehow restore a lost unity. Torres–García’s paintings say as much in their elaboration of multiple temporalities that converge in the neobaroque experiments of infinite recombination. (Plate 5.2) In closing, I offer a photo of a child sitting in front of an Inca wall as an emblem of mestizaje, and of Torres–García’s series of grid-walls. (Fig. 5.4) In the photograph, pre-Columbian ruin and post-Columbian actuality—the child—inhabit the same frame. Archived in the anthropological Musée du quai Branly, the photo intimates that the “childhood of man” was already long underway while “Abstract Man” was eroding in the background, evincing a pragmatic maturity as it lives its “impurity” and thinks nothing of it.32 Contrary to Hilton Kramer’s view, Torres–García’s paintings do seem to evoke the “mysteries of South American art history,” at least if we take mystery to mean the constitutive equivocations of neobaroque, “multiple temporalities.”33 The Estructura series emulates the play of light of the black-and-white photography of the twenties and thirties through techniques that go back to the Renaissance in order to fix an image of the purest and most originary. These are the vital contradictions

32

In the photo, part of the child’s head is superimposed upon the so-called “12angled stone,” which is now one of the main tourist attractions in Cusco today, a “must-see” in the Calle Hatun Rumiyoc—history thus adding an extra layer of irony. 33 Mabel Moraña, “Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, eds. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín–Estudillo (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 250.

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that render Constructive Universalism’s “familiar scenario” so opaque, so uncanny in its infinite looping of temporalities.

Figure 5.4. Inca wall (foundation of a house). Remnants of the so-called “Sinchi Roca Palace” (Hatun Rumiyoc) structure, built around 1520 in Cusco under Sinchi Roca, second Inca emperor. Raoul Raoul d’Harcourt collection, c. 1910–1919. Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

CHAPTER SIX CONGDON’S ABSTRACT ART AND THE METAPHYSICS OF IMMEDIACY NIEVES ACEDO

The historical arc of abstract art from Wassily Kandinsky’s earliest abstract watercolors to Robert Ryman’s monochromes and other more contemporary guises has been studied from a host of viewpoints. It is a subject that has unleashed rivers of ink possibly due to the difficulty of interpreting abstract art or because it comes so close to conceptual art and to philosophical speculation or because it represents a break with the tradition of Western art. Over time, though, the different lines of interpretation, be they formalist or expressionist, have reached a certain consensus over the fact that, in most cases, the abandonment of figurative painting does not reflect an attempt to escape from reality, but rather a desire to represent it better.1 Thus, the relationship with nature is a crucial aspect in the development of the avant-garde in general and of abstraction in particular. The access to reality or, in other words, the possibility of a metaphysics, which modern philosophy placed at the center of its interrogations, appears paradoxically to be a fundamental key to understanding modern art. The importance of this aspect, however, has not always been made clear in the historiography. Instead, discussion has focused on the two extremes of formalist and of biographical and evolutionary studies, intent on generating what Danto has called “legitimating narratives.” These narratives have, in turn, led to the formation of a canon that excludes everything that does not conform to a given logic. William Congdon (b. 1912 in Providence, Rhode Island, d. 1998 in Buccinasco, Milan) is one of the first artists who falls outside the 1

Valeriano Bozal, Los primeros diez años, 1900–1910, los orígenes del arte contemporáneo (Madrid: Visor, 1991), 25.

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boundaries set by the official canon. This makes his profoundly modern work helpful to achieve a more rounded picture of the period to which he belonged—postwar US painting—and to contrast his output with the official theories that have interpreted or “legitimated” the triumph of the New York School. The following pages set out to link Congdon’s abstract painting with a concern for metaphysics of an Aristotelian stripe. The point, though, is not that Congdon studied Aristotle and that his painting illustrates this fact, but that his painting appears naturally to dovetail with Aristotelian metaphysics. William Congdon always saw himself as an “action painter,” to use the term originally coined by Harold Rosenberg in 1952 to describe the New York School.2 Unlike the other members of his generation, however, he consciously steered clear of abstraction for over forty years. As a result, we can distinguish between a lengthy figurative period followed by an abstract period in the 1980s and 1990s. Congdon first achieved success when he was working with the Betty Parsons Gallery between 1948 and 1967, thanks to vedute of Mediterranean landmarks and landscapes that he produced as a modernist heir to the tradition of the Grand Tour. 3 Though this period covers a significant chunk of his career, it is not easy to find abstract paintings in his catalog, with the exception of New York Subway and Bowery (Dark) (Fig. 6.1), which he did as experiments in 1948, at the outset of his career. Though the views and landscapes that he produced once he had developed his language are deeply expressionistic, we cannot speak properly of abstraction, with the exception of a few paintings inspired by the Sahara Desert.

2

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, LI, nº 7 (December 1952), in The Tradition of the New (New York; Horizon Press, 1959), 33–34. 3 Peggy Guggenheim, who had close ties to Congdon in Venice, wrote of the man: “William Congdon non appartiene a nessun gruppo di pittori. Congdon sta a parte. Non appartiene a nessuna scuola. Nessuno ha mai cercato di dipingere alla sua maniera prima di lui. Egli è originale quanto Turner, ma la sua concezione e diametralmente opposta a quella del pittore inglese. La conversazione di Congdon è originale quanto il suo lavoro. Egli è pieno di fantasia. La sua pittura può considerarsi strana, ma questa è la sua attrattiva.” Peggy Guggenheim, “Un pittore di Venezia: William Congdon,” La Biennale di Venezia, exh. cat., 1953, 28–29.

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Figure 6.1. W William Congdoon, Bowery (Da ark), 1948. 20 x 25 cm. Courteesy of The William G. C Congdon Foundaation, Milano.

By contrrast, in his finnal years—paarticularly froom 1983 onwaards—his explorationss led him to produce paintin ngs of a purelly abstract kin nd. These works bringg us to an ageed Congdon, who w was tutorred in the eco onomy of means by thhe technique of o pastels and d hampered inn his gestural power p by arthritis, ultiimately to paiint series in th he nineties thaat teeter on thee verge of monochrom me.4 (Plate 6.1)) Focusingg on this laterr period, we find two chieef aspects maarking the distinctiveneess of Congddon’s abstract painting. Firrst is its untimeliness. Contemporaaries of Conggdon had produced their abstract wo ork much earlier than he did, whilee younger artists working in abstract paainting in the late eigghties and ninneties were always a part oof a highly co onceptual context, rem mote from the modernist m app proaches of thhe former grou up. 4

Giuseppe B Barbieri highligghted the year 1983 as the sstylistic turning g point in Congdon’s paainting, in “Oriizonte 1983,” Cielo C é Terra (R Rimini: FIUA, 1997), 8– 11. In my boook on the painnter, I developeed the same ideea in the chaptter entitled “1983. El añño del cambio,,” Un pintor americano a en IItalia: William Congdon (1912–1998) (Barañain: Eunnsa, 2006), 177– –189.

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The second feature, which is bound up with the first, is the isolation of these pictures from the artistic milieu. In his final twenty years, Congdon led the life of a monk, though he did not actually become one. His particular desert lay in the heart of Europe, on the outskirts of Milan. His estrangement was, above all, an inner one. He no longer enjoyed the consolation of exoticism and travel, which he had pursued throughout his life. The silence and monotony of the surrounding landscape are not irrelevant to the almost monochrome abstraction mentioned earlier. The challenge is somehow to situate this abstract work of Congdon, an artist born in 1912 who nonetheless did not produce his abstract pieces until late in the twentieth century. One attempt to interpret the abstract painting of the twentieth century can be seen in the exhibition curated by Barbara Rose in 2004 at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, titled Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present. In the catalog for the exhibition, Vincenzo Trione proposed grouping the artists in the show according to their disparate poetics: avant-garde (constructivism, abstraction, or Dadaism), informalists, expressionists, minimalists, and analytical artists. He was unable, however, to avoid the need for a further group to cover the remaining artists, whom he lumped together under the heading “eccentric experiences.” Had Congdon been part of the exhibition, he would have probably been put in this last group. In her essay “The Meanings of Monochrome” written for the show’s catalog, the American curator Barbara Rose asserted that “monochrome art has two origins: the mystical and the concrete. Its evolution in the twentieth century illustrates the divide between the spiritual quest for transcendental experience and the desire to emphasize the material presence of the object as concrete reality and not as illusion.”5 Indeed, these two aspects come together, with presence and transcendence as personal quests rising above the imperatives of style and school. They also correspond well with the circumstances in which an artist like Congdon found himself: isolated, a master of his materials, financially independent, and dedicated to achieving a synthesis of culturally contradictory elements. As Rose says elsewhere in her essay, “the adherence to the unity and indivisibility of the monochromatic is not a characteristic of style, but a personal stance, a Weltanschauung, a view of the world and of the function of the work of art, often at odds with the criteria of accessibility and mass spectacle.”6 The artist-monk resembles an alchemist, the master 5

Barbara Rose, “Los significados del monocromo,” in Monocromos: de Malevich al presente (Madrid: Documenta Ciencias y Artes Visuales, 2004), 21. 6 Barbara Rose, “Los significados del monocromo,” 22.

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of an esoteric science that seeks out the ideal synthesis in order to turn matter into spirit. My aim is to show the Weltanschauung or world view that accompanied Congdon on his quest. On earlier occasions, I have undertaken a detailed examination of Congdon’s abstract painting 7 and of the existential circumstances in which it was produced8. Here, I will advance an aesthetic definition or theory. Before designing a bespoke suit for Congdon, however, it will be a good idea to test out suits on him that were made for other artists, enquiring in each case how well they fit him.

An action painter fleeing abstraction In 1952, Harold Rosenberg launched into his influential article on action painters with this remark: What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement. . . . Yet without the definition something essential in those best is bound to be missed. The attempt to define is like a game in which you cannot possibly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by picking up each time from where the last play landed.9

As we know, before Rosenberg’s introduction of the New York School, the leading critic on the scene was Clement Greenberg and his definition was fundamentally a formalist one. The chief tenet of Greenberg’s way of looking at things, which is so close to the theory of the avant-garde and to the legacy of Immanuel Kant (in short, so modern), is to understand the canvas as a surface. From Kandinsky’s discovery in 1910 when he first looked at one of his watercolors as an abstract picture through to the color-field painters of New York, abstract painting had worked hard, according to this interpretation, to free itself of the many symbolist or illusionist aspects that had accreted over the course of history. Two-dimensionality and purity of content became the limits drawn around the experiments in language undertaken by several generations of artists. The prerequisite was to see the picture not as a 7

Nieves Acedo, “William Congdon en Milán: la presencia escondida,” in William Congdon y La Revisión del Expresionismo Abstracto, eds. Paula Lizarraga y Nieves Acedo (Barañain: Eunsa, 2010), 109–132; Acedo, William Congdon. 8 Ibid. 9 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 33–34.

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window into the cosmos, but as a cosmos itself, and then as an object in a world of objects. The touchstone of this definition, as it was applied to the abstract expressionists, is its rejection of the surrealist quest. This exclusion pushes a good number of artists out of its canon, perhaps even Jackson Pollock himself. Naturally, Congdon did not fit into this view either. As mentioned earlier, his work was that of a vedutista—a painter of views and landscapes—and his tradition harked back to the Grand Tourists of the romantic period. His images were those of a visionary. Nothing in Congdon’s work allows us to align him with this formalist tradition. Nonetheless, he belongs to it. How could it be otherwise for an artist trained in the 1930s and avidly drawing nourishment from the cultural life of New York, deeply immersed in its reception of the European tradition? Where Congdon does not fit is in its later rationalized version, which seeks to clear away any trace of intertextuality and releases painting from its Romantic legacy, turning pure visuality into an absolute and treating Surrealism as anathema. Nor does Congdon’s abstract painting, produced thirty years after he left New York, conform to this conceptual framework, because it entails no break with his poetics of the fifties, but rather is an evolution. In his Milan period, he did not start from scratch, he was not reborn, he did not shed his visionary nature. On the same grounds, Congdon’s abstract pictures do not accord with the definitions applied to understand minimalism. The narrative that leads from abstract expressionism to conceptual art has been recounted many times, following the same formalist tenets. First, it minimizes as far as possible the artistic content of the work of art, then it forces the work of art to make a leap to its context. The concept that fits this case is “theatricality,” developed by Michael Fried in Art and Objecthood.10 But Congdon’s painting always retains a quality of microcosm, of a window, that isolates the picture from its context by means of a frame. His pictures are never objects among other objects. It is certainly no coincidence that some of his most abstract pictures bear the title Finestra (or Window, in English). Circling back to Rosenberg’s statement above, though, the fact that Congdon always called himself an action painter does indicate some sense of kinship as regards the definition that Rosenberg put forward. As Dore Ashton says, “Rosenberg gradually took on himself the role of spokesperson for the artists who did not come under Greenberg’s aegis.” Against the rationalist and somewhat nationalist purism of Greenberg, 10

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967): 12–13.

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Rosenberg put forward a definition closer to existentialism. The figurative, expressionistic, romantic, and process-based art of an artist like de Kooning is, in this sense, not far from Congdon’s own art, and certainly closer than Congdon’s work is to other painters much more strongly linked to him, like Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko. As Dore Ashton herself has pointed out, literary references to Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger are constant after 1947; a certain kind of existential language became increasingly widespread. The following passage poses an example: I have watched through a window a World that is fallen, The mating and malice of men and beasts, The corporate greed of quiet vegetation, And the homesick little obstinate sobs Of things thrown into being.11

The distress of the decade after the war, which Auden expresses in these lines of poetry, is the same distress that appears in Congdon’s views of New York at the time. According to Ashton, it was Sartre’s influence that enabled the modern painter to “pursue his individuality while he worked on his canvases and still maintain a thread of hope that what he was doing would be of some value to the human race.”12 This way of thinking opened the door to an idea of “salvation through art” that was prevalent in the pages of journals like Possibilities and Tiger’s Eye, which enjoyed wide circulation among the artistic community of the period. The third issue of Tiger’s Eye, published in March 1948, contained a short extract from Friedrich Nietzsche, distinguishing his concepts of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In the same issue, Barnett Newman drew a parallel, relating the Apollonian tradition to Europe and the Dionysian tradition to America and arriving at the conclusion that “the artist in America is, by comparison, like a barbarian. He does not have the superfine sensibility toward the object that dominates European feeling.”13 That Congdon shared this view of American painting and broadly of existentialist propositions is demonstrated by the following extracts, taken from his correspondence with the English collector J.H. Ede: 11

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 64. 12 Cited in Dore Asthon, La Escuela de Nueva York, 1971 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), 251. 13 Ibid.

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Chapter Six I have written an article for a new Italian magazine which maybe I mentioned to you—It is short and it may be violent, but I say that American civilization is causing such a revolution in human life that only by so completely returning to the image (with no external conscious references) as do Pollock, Pousette–Dart, Rothko etc., will we redeem the conflict in art and create out of it a new great tradition in painting. This is an over-simplification I know, but the article is short and I am stressing a direction—and I want it to be strong. . . . Oh yes, I talk a little about myself and put in one WC illustration . . . but all I said was “Congdon does not go as far as do they in abstraction because he paints the more articulated environment of Italy, but he bears all the conflict in him and weaves it in and out of the crumbling arches of the Colosseum.”14

Four years later, his writing is still in this vein: And all this abysmal abstraction or “life” in America! Its plethora of things and “know-how,” and money and machines—All is commercial— original thinking and great feeling thrown out long ago in the ash bins. Such power and self-righteousness in their ignorance and their wealth. I am nearly literally sickened—.15

As these extracts show, Congdon relates abstraction to life in the United States. Indeed, he typically used the adjective “abstract” to refer to this way of life, as has been done here and elsewhere. In visual terms, his escape to Italy and the Mediterranean is precisely a flight from abstraction, which he saw as analogous to the existential crisis that hounded him. (Fig. 6.2) Ultimately, this estrangement justifies Congdon’s membership in the group of action painters, though not because of his similarity but because of his difference. Congdon’s style is consistent with Rosenberg’s definition in which he says: A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a “moment” in the unadulterated mixture of his life. . . . The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.16

14

Letter from William Congdon to Jim Ede, July 11, 1953. Letter from William Congdon to Jim Ede, December 6, 1957. Emphasis mine. 16 Harold Rosenberg, La Tradición de lo Nuevo, 1959 (Caracas: Monte Ávila Ed., 1969), 31. 15

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William Congddon, Athens No o. 1 (Acropolis) s), 1953. 100 x 145 cm. Figure 6.2. W Courtesy of T The William G. Congdon Foun ndation, Milanoo.

Elsewheere Rosenberg writes: The innovvation of Actioon Painting wass to dispense w with the represen ntation of the sttate in favor of o enacting it in physical m movement. . . . In the painting, the primary agency of physical motiion. . . . is the line, he sense of “figgure skating”).. In its conceivedd . . . as stroke or figure (in th passage oon the canvas eaach such line can establish thee actual movem ment of the artist’s body as an aeesthetic statemeent.17

The painnting as trace, the importance of movvement, the stress on process: thhese are the aspects thaat, together with other historical coincidences of time andd place, underrline Congdonn’s membersh hip in this school. (Figg. 6.3) Perhapss they are also what the art rt critic Emily y Genauer had in minnd when, in the t rather beelated year off 1960, she wrote an enthusiastic piece about the artist in what w was pracctically the to one of an obituary: “C Congdon, I shhould make clear at oncee, while admiitting the

17

Harold Rossenberg: "Hans Hofmann: Natture into Actionn," Art News (M May 1957): 30, in ibid., p. 30, note 1.

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looseness oof labels, is an abstract-eexpressionist artist,” 18 a surprising s remark to m make in referennce to a clearly y figurative arrtist.

Figure 6.3. W William Congdoon nel suo stud dio, 1981. Phottograph Elio an nd Stefano Ciol, Casarsaa. Courtesy of The T William G. Congdon Founndation, Milano.

Abstractiion and meetaphysical utopia From thhis brief overvview of Cong gdon’s fraughht inclusion within w the theoretical definition off his contemp poraries’ painnting, we tu urn to an account of thhe unusual paath that led him m to abstractioon. Special atttention is given to how w this path waas consistent with w a metaphhysical concep ption that seeks, precissely through painting, p to achieve immediiacy. In 1979, Congdon setttled in the Miilanese countrryside and hiss painting entered intoo its final periiod. As alway ys, his work w was tied to viision, but now this waas not a visioon of luminou us Mediterrannean culture. Rather, R it looked out onto the monnotony of thee fields and ffog of the Po o Valley. Though the steps that broought him therre have been rrecounted elseewhere, it is useful to recall his connversion to Caatholicism in 1959 and his arduous, but profounnd inner strugggle to integrrate his artisttic self-awareeness, his homosexuallity, his originns in the upper bourgeoisie and the psycchological 18

Emily Gennauer, “Congdoon Converted Uses Abstractionn to Serve Relig gion,” New York Herald T Tribune, Book Review (Augusst 21, 1960).

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wounds left by his wartime experiences into a coherent, and to some extent, harmonious whole. Painting at the very highest quality is both cause and effect of a gradual integration of these contradictory aspects. The series Autunno, of 1981; Nebbia, Verso Primavera, Ottobre and Novembre of 1983; Cielo–Terra, of 1984; Neve, of 1985, and others, contain moments of profound abstraction that begin in color fields and progress emphatically toward monochromatic reduction. The action painter vanishes in this period, making way for a painter deeply focused on the potential in expanses of color. (Plate 6.2) At the same time, Congdon’s notebooks and letters show how his thinking was evolving, as viewer and as critic, in relation to the process of his own painting. Some of the quotes taken from Congdon’s personal journal entries are particularly complex. Written for personal use, they appear to gush forth from his pen and he made no effort to tidy them up later with a view toward communication. In this respect, they are also an expression of the elusive nature of the intuitions that he wanted to grab hold of and that are doubtless conveyed much better in his pictorial work. First, though, an analysis of his journal entries leads us on a brief detour, showing us Congdon’s possible glimpses into Eastern philosophy. In an entry dated February 20, 1992, the painter writes: “Better late than never, I’m reading Sentimento del colore and I’m getting there forty years after my colleagues, who studied Zen in New York.”19 Although no book in his library is known to have had this title, Congdon includes in a letter to Paolo Mangini, written on March 3, 1992, a few extracts from the volume with quotes from Toshihiko Izutsu and other Buddhist thinkers. Based on these references, we can conclude that the book was an Italian edition of the lectures of the Eranos group. 20 The volume on color corresponds to the 1972 Eranos Yearbook, published in English in 1977

19

“Meglio tardi che mai, sto leggendo ‘Sentimento del colore’, e arrivo dopo 40 anni dietro i miei colleghi che studiavano lo Zen a New York,” Journal entry made by William Congdon on February 20, 1992, Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan. 20 The meetings of the Eranos group, which were first held in 1933, took place every summer in the Swiss town of Ascona, bringing together leading figures in the sciences and other academic disciplines for a kind of cultural gathering. In an extracurricular and intercultural setting, they engaged in discussions on a range of topics from the soul and nature to yoga and meditation in the East and West, and more.

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under the title Color Symbolism.21 Given the strong Jungian orientation of the Eranos group, 22 it is logical that reading the volume would put Congdon in mind of the concerns of the New York artists he called his “colleagues,” who were so heavily influenced by Jung’s theory of archetypes and, by and large, had such a deep interest in Eastern mysticism. However, while these allusions in his journal entries coincide with his visual experiments at the time, they are rare in comparison to constant references to various aspects of Catholic spirituality that he had striven to assimilate since his conversion. Reaching the end of this brief detour, it appears rather that Congdon’s openness to Eastern thought and his interest in monasticism and meditation should be taken as similar, for instance, to the stance adopted by Thomas Merton, whom Congdon had met to ask for a foreword to his 1961 book In My Disc of Gold.23 Another intellectual who was particularly close to him was Jacques Maritain, a philosopher who had converted to Catholicism and dedicated himself to recovering and spreading the thought of Thomas Aquinas. These references and Congdon’s own work and writings give rise to the suspicion that the path toward abstraction, which he undertook so belatedly, is related to a gradual assimilation of certain principles of Catholic thought. By way of explanation, I will make reference to texts on art and philosophy by Fernando Inciarte (1929–2000), a Spaniard living in Germany, who taught philosophy in Cologne and Freiburg before going on to become a professor at the University of Münster. Deeply conversant with the philosophy of Heidegger, Inciarte saw the resurgence of 21

This was probably the 1990 edition: S. Sambursky, G. Scholem, H. Corbin in D. Zahn, T. Izutsu, Il sentimento del colore. L'esperienza cromatica come simbolo, cultura e scienzia, trans. into Italian (Como: Quaderni di Eranos, RED, 1990). 22 As Luis Garagalza puts it: “No matter how much Jung resisted being seen as the founder of Eranos, it is highly likely that without his language the group, in its ambitions to build a dialogue between East and West, would have become not a hermeneutic circle, but a vicious circle, mired in navel-gazing and turning into just one more of the many sects of esoteric Orientalists.” Luis Garagalza, Introducción a la hermenéutica contemporánea: Cultura, simbolismo y sociedad (Rubí: Anthropos, 2002), 112. 23 Thomas Merton is celebrated for his insights, from a standpoint of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, into Eastern monasticism, lamas, Zen Buddhism and other such forms. His conclusions are collected in texts such as “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton,” which was published in Spanish by Trotta (Madrid), in 2000.

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metaphysics amid the cultural contradictions of the late twentieth century. In the words of his editor Lourdes Flamarique, Inciarte “was able to recognize the profundity of the superficial, that is, the echoes of metaphysics in culture, in its woven fabric of reality and fiction, of presences and representations. He blazed a trail for metaphysics after the end of metaphysics."24 Inciarte is especially useful for the analysis that I am pursuing here because he addressed this issue not head-on but more stealthily or, as Flamarique puts it, “from the flanks.” And one of these flanks is art. Thus, when we speak of metaphysics, it is necessary to define which metaphysics. Being clear that it is Aristotelian metaphysics does not go far enough. We need to add that it is Aristotelian metaphysics as recovered by Inciarte: stripped back and rid of the many accretions of Late Scholastic thought and of modernity. This is a metaphysics that Inciarte himself defines as minimal, poor, a product of dispossession. That is, a metaphysics that reduces its expository presentation as far as possible, but not completely because “bare metaphysics lacking any expository presentation would not be metaphysics, but mysticism.” Only through exposition, however minimal, can metaphysics escape its utopian character. The utopia of metaphysics consists of achieving the utmost immediacy. However, pure unmediatedness is not something that human beings can attain in this world, because mediation always intervenes. Nonetheless, coming to the realization that mediation is not the whole story, that there is in addition to mediation—and on the basis of mediation—unmediatedness: this is the crucial task of contemporary metaphysics. Unmediatedness is the poverty of thought. The other, the exposition, is its riches.25

What is fundamental to the definition of metaphysics and the possibility of access to reality, or of unmediatedness, is abstraction. In the case of Congdon’s painting, as noted earlier, the relation to abstraction undergoes a shift. This shift appears to follow a clear path. No longer fleeing abstraction as he did in the fifties, Congdon returns to abstraction in the nineties: starting from a conception of abstraction that we could call post-Scholastic, stripping it back to its Aristotelian origins. This is a journey that calls to mind Inciarte’s reflections on metaphysics, though in Congdon’s case it is clearly not explicit, but implicit in his painting. To 24 Lourdes Flamarique, "El arte o el refugio de la metafísica,” in Nueva Revista, nº 93 (May–June 2004): 152. 25 Fernando Inciarte and Alejandro Llano, Metafísica tras el final de la Metafísica (Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 2007), 21.

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understand this journey better, Inciarte’s texts can help to restate or paraphrase Congdon’s painting and writings and his complex, but fruitful relationship with abstraction. The first thing that draws our attention in Congdon’s reflections on his abstract pictures is his resistance to accepting the epithet “abstract” for paintings that are clearly abstract. For example, in 1989, he wrote: “To anyone who tells me that it’s abstract, I respond, ‘it’s the opposite of abstract, it’s the total object’.”26 (Plate 6.3) Congdon’s refusal to apply the term “abstract” to his painting is consistent with the notion of abstraction that he applied to the work of his New York colleagues, as seen earlier, and to the life he had fled many years earlier, when he wrote, for example: “I was so caught up in the aggressiveness of American self-merchandizing that I too began to howl at the World about me, to recognize me—like a crying child.”27 What is behind this notion of abstraction that he rejects? And in what sense can we call his later painting abstract? What is the conceptual distinction underlying this ambiguity? From the text above, we can surmise that the “abstraction of American life” of which Congdon was speaking made it hard for him to distinguish between reality and fiction. The plethora of “merchandizing” representation and mediation becomes an impediment to “recognizing” oneself. The flight from abstraction and from America became a way to avoid fiction and seek contact with reality. Indeed, the ambiguity of the concept of “abstraction” has to do with the problem of distinguishing reality from fiction. The difficulty of drawing the line that separates the two is a distant inheritance of the West, which reaches fever pitch by the end of the twentieth century in the neoSophist proposal of nondifferentiation, abolishing opposites so as to thwart any such discriminations. Inciarte traces the origins of this nondifferentiation between reality and fiction to the thought of a group of philosophers that included Duns Scotus. At the dawn of modernity, they “drew a distinction between a mode of intuitive cognition, directed at proximity and immediacy, and a mode of abstract cognition, mediated by signs, and they declared that the former (the cognitio intuitiva) was unattainable and that therefore so was

26 “A chi mi dice “è astratto,” io: “è l’opposto d’astratto, è l’oggetto totale,” Journal entry made by William Congdon on January 25, 1989, Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan. 27 Letter to Jim Ede, December 1956.

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unmediated reality.”28 Thereafter, the sign or representation takes the place of the concept, where the sign is mediation and the concept is immediacy: “the concept is the only sign that does not stand between us and reality, the only one that does not supplant reality as its representative or substitute, as its representation. The sign—word and image—stands for the thing, while the concept is the thing itself, though, to be sure, in another mode of existence.”29 Sign or concept: this is the key to understanding what kind of abstraction we are referring to, because Congdon conceived broadly of painting and specifically of abstraction—which he did not want to name as such—as a gateway to knowledge or, if one prefers, to communion. On one side, there is Duns Scotus’ abstract mode of knowledge mediated by signs, which conforms to the idea of abstraction that Congdon is defending himself against: it is marked by mediation, absence, or estrangement from reality. It is hard to distinguish from fiction. The sign (image or word) stands for the thing. Or worse yet, in the aggressive environment that was smothering Congdon, the sign stood for the sign. That is, it was the sign of another sign. Access to reality remained sequestered behind countless layers of meaning and overlaid levels of language. There is no truth, only opinions in competition with one another “in the marketplace” and denuded of any argument that might prevail, other than the use of force, seduction, or deception. Unsurprisingly, Congdon is not on the side of the sign and Duns Scotus, but rather on the side of the concept and Aristotle. In Aristotle, there is abstraction as well, but it is different in kind. Significantly, Congdon’s refuge in his art, his dependence on it, shows that he does not conceive of his pictures merely as signs among other signs. To the contrary, he sees painting not as an impediment, but as an interface with the world and tradition that enables him to recognize himself. In effect, the notion of abstraction introduced by Duns Scotus had come to supplant the positive sense that the term had had in Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. While Duns Scotus understood abstraction to be the moment at which image or word takes form, Aristotle viewed “abstraction” as something akin to seeing the structures of reality spiritually. Put differently: in painting, abstraction can be reached by starting with the repudiation of an order and rationality as Informalism does, or by following a constructivist or analytic propensity. Congdon’s abstraction is 28

Fernando Inciarte, Imágenes, palabras, signos: Sobre arte y filosofía (Barañáin: Eunsa, 2004), 31. 29 Ibid., 33.

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not an abstraction built ideally out of a deconstruction of figuration, but neither is it “nonfigurative,” as constructivist abstraction in the style of Malevich is. That is, it is neither expressionist nor self-referential. The abstraction at which he arrives seeks reality; it does not flee from reality. It is consistent, therefore, with the idea of Aristotelian abstraction: to see reality spiritually. In his writing, Congdon uses images of the Bedouin and the monk to express how he understands the type of vision that appears in his abstract paintings. It is a way of looking that, when it does not see “something,” is capable of seeing the “all” in the apparent nothingness. Here, the “void” or “nothingness” is the opposite of “something,” and “something” in turn is the opposite of the “all.” In this sense, apparent “nothingness” is closer to the “all” than to “something.” Ultimately, the “something” is genuine “nothingness” because everything that “is something” focuses on this “something” while forgetting the “is” that comes before it. Abstract painting does not help us to identify the “something.” For this reason, it is suitable for capturing being. Let us see how this can be so. In a journal entry from 1986, Congdon refers to a discussion with his friend Paolo Mangini and wonders: Why does Paolo, when looking at a picture of mine that has only two masses of color, say that “we are on the brink of nothingness”? There is an apparent nothingness, yes. But dwelling in this nothingness are all the beasts of the earth and sea. And if an object had been added, perhaps a tree, would the nothingness be less? No, there would be more nothingness than ever. The insistence that there must be an object to enliven the mass of color calls to mind those people who think that the presence or representation of a sacred figure is what renders art sacred. An Arab living in the desert would have no difficulty accepting the two empty masses as inhabited. He is accustomed to seeing, to reading his entire life in the apparent nothingness of the naked sky and the naked earth. But he who sees a void or nothingness in a mass that contains no objects either sees the void because it is empty or does not know how to see the color that contains life, that is teeming with life. Otherwise the painting is not alive.30 30 “Perché Paolo dice guardando un quadro di due sole masse “siamo all’orlo del nulla?” Dell’apparente nulla, sì. Ma in questo nulla vi abitano tutte le bestie della terra e del mare. E se avessi introdotto un oggetto? Un albero? Sarebbe meno nulla? No, potrebbe essere più che mai nulla. L’insistenza su di un oggetto per far vivere la massa è

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A Bedoin’s and a monk’s ways of looking coincide in their poverty, in their propensity for reduction: In order to value things rightly, the artist’s love is the opposite of the love felt by monks, who shut their eyes in order to think. Whether you are one or the other, you are divided: only the blessed artist is a total human being. . . . It seems inescapable that a gradual synthesis (simplification) of things will reduce the patchwork mosaic of fields to huge voids populated with rare stalks.31

The gradual disappearance of objects in Congdon’s series is linked, therefore, to the poverty of vision. The countryside of the Milanese lowlands is neither picturesque nor sublime. There is nothing there to be painted. It is the very landscape that drives the artist to strip back. If Mont Saint–Victoire asserts its iconic presence in Cezanne’s painting, the Milanese countryside disappears beneath the fog and the passing of the seasons. Congdon seems to ask himself, as leading metaphysicians have done throughout history, why is there something and not nothing? The countryside shows Congdon his own precariousness, which he paints and makes disappear through the gateway of abstraction. (Plate 6.2) In the winter of 1982, Congdon writes in his journal: Silence not derived from things, but rather silence as the creator of things! . . . This silence as the painting’s starting point is the power or comes from the power (grace) of the fog. I got rid of everything so that

come coloro che pensano che la presenza o la raffigurazione di un personaggio sacro renda sacra l’arte. . . . Un arabo che vive nel deserto non avrebbe nessuna difficoltà ad accettare queste due masse vuote, come abitate. Lui è abituato a vedere, leggere tutta la sua vita nell’apparente nulla del nudo cielo e della nuda terra. Ma chi vede “vuoto” o “nulla” una massa che non reca oggetto, o vede quel vuoto, perché è vuoto, o non sa leggere il colore che reca la vita, che è popolato dalla vita. Oppure il quadro non vive.” Journal entry made by William Congdon on January 29, 1986. Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan. 31 “l’artista ama per valorizzare le cose in esatto opposto ai monaci che chiudono gli occhi alle cose– sia uno che l’altro è uomo frazionato. . . . Mi sembra inevitabile che un progressivo sintetizzare (semplificare) le cose— riduca il mosaico dei campi a dei vasti vuoti popolati da rare steli,” Journal entry made by William Congdon on December 2, 1982. Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan.

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The stripping away that leads to the void, to the nothingness that is everything because it is not something, shows the precariousness and contingency of all existence. “Everything nameable, everything describable rests on itself,” says Inciarte picking up on Thomas Aquinas. “This is how it seems to us, this is what our vision tells us. But this is not how it is.” He goes on: “to the extent that nonfigurative painting shows us nothing . . . it robs us of our security . . . ; it pulls the safe ground out from under our feet, as it were, and we feel suddenly in the abyss of a nothingness that, as Thomas Aquinas said, is the only thing that is naturaliter, that is essential to the creature, to the universe in its entirety.” 33 This is why abstract painting is metaphysical: because, as noted earlier, through its absence of subject matter, it speaks to us of nothingness, of the absence of a particular something, but above all because it reveals our precariousness, that suspendedness between being and nothingness. As we have seen, abstraction in Congdon is not the opposite of figuration. There exists nonfigurative abstract art and abstraction that originate in concrete objects. Congdon did not reject the object, but rather takes it as a starting point. His titles offer proof of this (neve, cielo, terra and so forth). This is not nonfigurative painting; it is anti-illusionist painting. Whatever the case, though, it is painting that does not let us rest in recognition (there is no mountain there). Clearly, if there is no recognition, there is no representation either. Art forfeits its vicarious character, its role as mediation. As Inciarte says, “seeing such forms, we are perpetually uneasy because we do not know what it is or even if it is something or nothing. This suspendedness between being and nothing is precisely the metaphysical.”34 Congdon perceives the precarious equilibrium and expresses it, albeit in a somewhat clumsy manner, when he tries to grasp the meaning of Pollock’s painting retrospectively, in light of the man’s death, and 32

“Silenzio non derivante dalle cose ma il silenzio che ha creato le cose! . . . Questo Silenzio come partenza del quadro è la virtù o per virtù (o grazia) della nebbia. Mi è stata tolta ogni cosa—finché ciò che non vedo nasca—non c'èpiù la cosa—ma viene rivelata per il filtro (spirito) della nebbia.” Journal entry made by William Congdon on January 7, 1982. Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan. 33 Fernando Inciarte, Imágenes, 80. 34 Ibid., 78.

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interprets Pollock’s suicide as a realization of the death already present in his painting: The great task that lies ahead of us: to delve deeper into this clarifying (I don’t know how to express myself) this until now hidden commitment (precarious balance) between being and non-being in the artist, which accordingly defines his art. The world is not interested in this distinction, which determines whether art is really art, whether it lives. . . . Pollock took his art to the “limit” (of diabolical non-being), to the “limit” in the sense that his art was non-being and nothing else. I (like other artists) live poised between being and non-being, where it is possible to encourage their merging into one another. . . . That is, Pollock has revealed that there is a being art and a non-being art. Pollock’s calamity [his suicide] revealed that there can be no living art unless it comes alive within the artist. . . . Until Pollock, this fact remained hidden in the equilibrium that artists (like any other living human being) maintained in the exact balancing point at which being through art recovered the artist’s non-being, in an art that was, therefore, always an act of salvation.35

Concept, unmediatedness, stripping away, nothingness, contingency. There is yet one more aspect in which Congdon’s abstract painting is an expression of this metaphysical utopia. It is his attempt to capture a moment of stopped time, registering the eternity of each instant. This aspect is particularly on display in his series. Whether figurative or not, Congdon’s series involve the repetition of a subject, of a view that varies 35 “Il grande lavoro da fare: approfondire questo portare a chiaro termine (non so esprimermi) questo fin ad oggi nascosta compromessa (equilibrio precario) tral’essere nell’artista e il non-essere, e in consequenza cosi determinando la sua arte. Il mondo non s’interessa in questa distinzione, la quale, determina se l’arte è veramente arte, cioè, se VIVE— . . . Pollock ha portato a “termine” (del diavolo del non essere) la sua arte—a “termine” nel senso che sua arte era quel non-essere e null’altro. Io (come altri artisti) vivo un equilibrio tral’essere e non essere in cui uno può favorire fondersi nell’altro. . . . Cioè, Pollock ha rivelato c'è un arte-essere e un arte non-essere. Il disastro di Pollock ha rivelato che senza l’essere vissuto nell’artista, l’arte come la vita non può esserci. . . . Fino a Pollock, questo fatto è statu nascosto nell’equilibrio vissuto da gli artisti (come lo vive ogni uomo) e in quell’esatto equilibrio in cui l’essere per via dell’arte ricuperava il non-essere nell’artista in un arte sempre, perciò, redentiva. La furia di Pollock è quella furia con la quale egli ha rigetta tol’essere, —che vuoldire, rigettare ogni oggetto vita(?)—cioèl’arte stessa.” Journal entry made by William Congdon on February 27, 1982. Archives of the William G. Congdon Foundation, Buccinasco, Milan.

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gradually from picture to picture. In this respect, the image that he paints has an ecstatic quality, of time being halted. The repetition of the same moment in several paintings is the materialization of a concept, a spiritualized view of the thing, which stops time by introducing the perspective of death. To elucidate this, Inciarte employs a metaphor that I would like to re-use here to convey Congdon’s vision: the Red Sea viewed slantwise. That is, if the river (in its narrowness, the Red Sea is seen here as a river) is a metaphor for life, for the flowing of time, then stopping its flow so that the Hebrew people may cross introduces a new perspective, the perspective of death. Death is not only at the mouth of the river, where it empties into the sea, but at any spot along its course. Time in art is an ecstatic time, a simultaneous time. Working in series also privileges the notion of art as process over art as product, reflecting the indeterminate, limited, yet unfinished nature of the world. That is why art makes it possible to pull back the curtain, in a sense, and to transcend mediation. But not as a sign that claims in its reality to repudiate the falsehood of everything else; this is not the artistic sign that Marcel Proust considered “the most real of all things.” 36 To the contrary, art is a manifestation of the real in that “art may well do nothing more . . . than reflect and maximize the ecstatic character inherent in the concentrated extract that is both real time and all of life in its essentially limited existence, yet not limited by an expiry date—that of death—external to itself.”37 To conclude, Congdon’s abstract painting also conveys the unity of apparent opposites typical of the kind of metaphysics we have been exploring. Congdon’s way of looking at the fields over the surface of the earth; his abolishing of depth, and his conception of the canvas as a ground; his gleaning of the superficial changes in crops as they go through the seasons: these reflect an attempt to focus on the surface in order to arrive at the depth of things. Congdon seeks a depth that is not beyond the surface, but rather is the surface itself. There is no opposition between the profound and the superficial, between the mysterious and the obvious. Aristotelian metaphysics does not distinguish between opposites either, unlike the metaphysics that modern thinkers, from Immanuel Kant to Deconstruction, sought to destroy. The sole opposition that “poor” metaphysics knows is the opposition between being and non-being. Profundity and mystery do not stand in opposition to superficiality because there is no “beyond,” only surface. “In effect, everything is

36 37

Fernando Inciarte, Imágenes, 59. Ibid.

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surface, but the surface is deep, that is to say, it is inexhaustible.” 38 Changes in the surface also let us perceive the world’s coefficient of indeterminacy, its forever unfinished nature, neither total nor absolute, its fragility. The quest for immediacy, a process of which Congdon’s late painting is an expression, it is long and in the end, because it is utopian, only halfaccomplished. In theory, to gain access to the world, one needs only to open one’s eyes, easy as that. The problem is that reality never appears as easily as that. “To see only matter, the path is very long; it is necessary to separate out everything else, all meaning . . . . Opening one’s eyes to what is there and nothing else. That is the ideal of all philosophy.” 39 If we opened our eyes as soon as we were born, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a long road. But humans are late to look, to open our eyes. Merely looking is particular to the old artist, the sage, who has needed to learn how to see over an entire lifetime. To arrive at reality and nothing but that, to reach the immediacy to which humans aspire, requires a whole life of stripping back and reducing the mediations. And even that may not be enough; after everything, it may also still be necessary to die.

38 39

Fernando Inciarte, Imágenes, 104. Ibid., 164.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE ABSTRACTION OF BEHAVIOR GORDON MONRO

Introduction There is a class of artworks that exhibit behavior: they exhibit a process of movement or change, or derive from a process that moves or changes, and the process is deliberately composed by the artist as part of making the work. This paper considers how notions of abstraction and representation in art carry over to this new situation. With a painting (say) there is only the static visual appearance to consider. With the works considered here, we now also have to consider the process as part of the work, and the situation becomes more complicated. This is not to deny that a painting can participate in a complex web of references and allusions; with the works considered here, the process can also participate in such webs, to a large extent independently of the visual appearance of the work. The works discussed in this paper fall under the category of “generative art,” whose most widely accepted definition (due to Philip Galanter) is as follows: Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.1

1

Philip Galanter, “What is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory,” 6th International Conference, Exhibition and Performances on Generative Art and Design (GA 2003), Milan. Available at http://www.generativeart.com/on/cic/papersGA2003/a22.pdf, accessed August 18, 2013.

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Galanter's definition does not require that a computer be used, and some of the works discussed in the present paper do not use a computer. However, the introduction of the computer vastly expanded the possibilities for generative art; in addition, the introduction of the computer led to the recognition of generative art as a genre in its own right. Discussions of generative art have tended to focus on the aspect of autonomy in the definition, or on the systems themselves.2 The emphasis of this paper is on representation and abstraction in the context of artworks exhibiting behavior. As in all such discussions, there will be borderline cases. For example, I rule out Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, as he did not explicitly compose a process of actions. The word “abstraction” has developed two distinct meanings, which I refer to as “representational abstraction” and “nonrepresentational abstraction.” The term “representational abstraction” applies to art in which a recognizable object or figure is used as the starting-point, as in Mondrian's Pier and Ocean series. 3 The term “nonrepresentational abstraction” (also called “pure abstraction,” as in the phrase “purely abstract”) does not take any objects or visual images as its starting point. I will apply the terms “representational abstraction” and “nonrepresentational abstraction” to processes as well as images. I use the compound term “representation/abstraction” to refer to the entire spectrum from thoroughly representational works through works showing representational abstraction in varying degrees to purely abstract works.

Movement The simplest form of behavior is movement. An outstanding example of movement in a work of art (at least in the sense of technƝ) is the “digesting duck” or “defecating duck” (canard digérateur) of Jacques de 2

Galanter, “What is Generative Art?”; Margaret A. Boden and Ernest A. Edmonds, “What is Generative Art,” Digital Creativity 21 no. 1 (2009): 26–46; Alan Dorin, Jonathan McCabe, Jon McCormack, Gordon Monro and Mitchell Whitelaw, “A Framework for Understanding Generative Art,” Digital Creativity 23 no. 3–4 (2012): 239–259. 3 For example: Piet Mondrian, “Pier and Ocean 5: ‘Zee en sterrenlicht’ (Sea and Starry Sky),” charcoal, ink and gouache on paper, 1915 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné (2 vols), Joop M. Joosten and Robert P. Welsh (New York: Harry M. Abrams, 1998), 2: 250.

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Vaucanson (exhibited 1738; Fig. 7.1).4 This had ovver a thousand d moving parts and coould flap its wings and move m in otherr ways, drink k, make a gurgling nooise, eat grain, and excreete. The aim was to repllicate the behavior of a real duck.

Figure 7.1. JJacques de Vauucanson, Digessting Duck (caanard digérateur), 1738. Image reprodduced in “Auttomata: A Hisstorical and Teechnological Study,” S by Alfred Chapuuis and Edmondd Droz, Edition ns du Griffon, N Neuchâtel, 1958 8. There is some doubt aas to whether thhis photograph really r is of Vauucanson’s creatiion, which in any case w was much alteredd by 1805.

4

Jennifer Risskin, “The Defe fecating Duck, or, o the Ambiguuous Origins off Artificial Life,” Criticaal Enquiry 20 no. n 4 (Summerr 2003): 599–6333. The Duck was much altered over the years. A restoration in 1785 had to surmount “exttraordinary uck in 1805 it hhad “lost its feathers and difficulties,” and when Goethe saw the Du [was] reducedd to a skeleton.” It was furtheer rebuilt in thee early 1840s. See S Alfred Chapuis and Edmund Drozz, Automata: A Historical annd Technological Study, trans. Alec Reeid (Neuchatel:: Editions du Grriffon, 1958), 2233–235.

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The mechanism of the duck consisted of rods, cams, and gears rather than muscles and sinews, though Vaucanson attempted to represent the real anatomy of the duck at least to some extent. This does not apply to the “digestion,” which was nonexistent: the duck stored the food it ingested in an internal compartment and excreted pre-prepared droppings. It is natural to regard this as cheating, though it could be more charitably considered as exhibiting a (highly abstracted) representational abstraction of digestion: something goes in and something else comes out. It is also fair to say that Vaucanson was working at the limit of the technology of the time, and he seems to have felt that it ought to be possible to imitate physiological processes like digestion in the same way that he so successfully imitated muscular movements.5 An example of a work that can be said to exhibit pointillist movement is the video Begin (2012) by Cameron Rose.6 (Fig. 7.2) The work displays a grid of statically placed dots, each of which is either black or white. If almost any frame from the video is viewed in isolation, it appears as a fairly abstract pattern of dots. However, once the video is set in motion it becomes apparent that it represents two people dancing, and it actually derives from a film clip of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell tap-dancing. The perception of movement emerges from the blinking on and off of the dots, analogously to the way that in a pointillist painting the perception of form emerges from the dots of pure color. I classify Begin as exhibiting representational abstraction of both form and behavior, where the representation of form is perceived as more abstracted than the representation of behavior. As a third example of movement, I take the mobile The Lace on the Edge of Your Panties (1947) by Alexander Calder.7 (Fig. 7.3) The form of the work consists of Calder’s characteristic rounded shapes in sheet metal, and some of them have holes, giving a lacy appearance; certainly, given the title, there is an element of representation. The movement, however, is movement for movement’s sake, not inspired by anything in the world. From the point of view of process, Calder’s mobiles form a borderline case. Calder did not formalize a set of rules for the motion, but he did design 5

Vaucanson subsequently engaged in a project to imitate the circulation of the blood, supported financially by Louis XV. See Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” 601. 6 Cameron Rose, Begin, video (2012), duration 3 mins. Available at http://vimeo.com/44285308, accessed August 20, 2013. 7 Alexander Calder, The Lace on the Edge of Your Panties, sheet, metal, wire and paint, 1947 (Calder Foundation, New York), http://www.calder.org/work/bycategory/hanging-mobile.

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Figure 7.2. Cameron Rose, Begin, 2012. Still from video. Copyright Cameron Rose 2012.

Figure 7.3. Alexander Calder, The Lace on the Edge of Your Panties, 1947. Sheet metal, wire and paint, 33 x 190 x 47 cm. Calder Foundation, New York.

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the mobiles so that they would move in a certain way. Thus, I count the mobiles as exhibiting designed behavior.

Response to stimuli In this section, I consider a more complex form of behavior than simple movement, namely response to stimuli, as shown in two works by the Polish/British artist Edward Ihnatowicz. The first work is Sound Activated Mobile, or SAM (1968), which was exhibited in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition of that year. SAM was a flower-like structure on a stem made of vertebrae-like segments, the whole thing being around 70 cm tall. The “flower-head” had four small microphones in it, connected to electronic circuitry that could determine the direction a sound was coming from. The stem would bend so that the flower pointed towards the source of the sound. The piece only responded to relatively quiet and sustained sounds. The internal machinery of SAM consisted of analog electronic circuitry and hydraulic activators.8 The second work of Ihnatowicz’s that I consider is The Senster (1970); it was commissioned by the Dutch electronics firm Philips, and was on display in Eindhoven in Holland until 1974, when it was dismantled. This was in essence a more sophisticated version of SAM, equipped with a radar unit for detecting movement as well as microphones, and with an articulated body that had more modes of movement than SAM. The Senster was also much bigger than SAM, being over four meters long. As with SAM, The Senster would respond to sustained soft sounds. It would shy away from loud sounds and also from sudden movements, which it could detect thanks to its radar apparatus. The core of the control system for The Senster was a digital computer, supplemented by analog electronics. The Senster is claimed to be the world’s first computer controlled robotic sculpture that reacted to people around it.9

8

Aleksandar Zivanovic and Stephen Boyd Davis, “Elegant Motion: The Senster and Other Cybernetic Sculptures by Edward Ihnatowicz,” Kybernetes 40 no. 1/2 (2011): 47–62; Aleksandar Zivanovic, “SAM—Sound Activated Mobile,” electrohydraulically operated sound-seeker, 1968, http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/ SAM/sam.htm. 9 Zivanovic and Davis, “Elegant Motion”; Aleksandar Zivanovic, “The Senster,” http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/senster/index.htm.

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Biomorphic behavior The term “biomorphism” (as used in art) is succinctly defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows: The use in painting or sculpture of abstract forms derived from or suggesting biological organisms.10

In accordance with this definition, I consider biomorphic art as falling under representational abstraction. I extend the meaning of the term to artworks that exhibit behavior11 that is inspired by behavior in nature but does not necessarily imitate any natural model directly. I note that the term “biomorphism” as applied to art originally arose in a polemical context, a debate in the 1930s concerning the nature and direction of abstract art;12 however, the term is now simply a descriptive one and I use it as such. I have described the form of SAM using biological terms such as “flower” and “vertebrae,” but the likeness is not very close; the appearance of SAM derives from its function.13 Nonetheless, the appearance of SAM is biomorphic. The static visual appearance of The Senster is less biomorphic, consisting as it does of a lattice-work of steel tubes reminiscent of an industrial crane. However, it does have legs, a torso, and at the front, not exactly a head, but a cluster of sense organs (literally, being the microphones and radar system). In contrast, the behavior of both SAM and The Senster is strongly biomorphic; no specific living organism’s behavior is being copied, unlike the case of Vauconson’s Duck, but the behavior is certainly perceived as lifelike.

Inner and outer aspects With respect to a work such as The Senster, I use the term “outer aspect” to refer to both the static visual appearance and the observable behavior of the work, and the term “inner aspect” to refer to the hidden 10 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Biomorphism,” accessed August 18, 2013, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/biomorphism. 11 Although the “morph” element in the word “biomorphic” means “form,” I have chosen to extend the meaning of “biomorphic” rather than coin a new term. 12 Jennifer Mundy, “The Naming of Biomorphism,” in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed. Oliver A.I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 61–75. 13 Zivanovic and Davis state with respect to SAM that “[Ihnatowicz] had not tried to imitate any natural forms.” Zivanovic and Davis, “Elegant motion,” 52.

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parts of the work, in the case of The Senster the computer program and the electronic and hydraulic components. I consider the works so far discussed from the point of view of inner and outer aspects. The mechanisms of Vauconson’s Duck were in part modeled on the anatomy of a real duck. So, not only were the appearance and the behavior of the duck realistic, but the concealed mechanism was as far as practicable imitated from nature as well. Vaucanson’s Duck was in large part a philosophical experiment, to determine whether and to what extent the functions of animals and humans were essentially mechanical.14 Thus, it was important that the inner aspect of the work reflected the anatomy of a real duck; the mechanism was more than an expedient contrivance. I therefore call the inner aspect of the duck realistic, in the sense of realism in art. Calder’s mobiles and Rose’s video Begin do not have inner aspects of the sort discussed here. SAM and The Senster do have inner aspects, in each case modeled on the idea of a biological reflex, though not on reflexes in specific animals. I therefore classify the inner aspect of both works as biomorphic.

Abstraction and the computer The use of the computer brings abstraction into the center of the discussion, as the computer is a machine for manipulating patterns of bits, and such patterns have no intrinsic meaning; that is to say the computer is a machine for manipulating abstract entities. There is a popular idea that the computer deals with numbers, but this is not the best way to think about what it does. Consider the pattern of bits written 00101000 in binary notation, which occupies one byte (a byte is a group of eight bits). This could have any of the following meanings, or many more: x As a pixel in a gray-scale image, it indicates a dark gray, though not black. x As the “A” component of a color pixel in RGBA format, it indicates a pixel about five-sixths transparent. x As the first byte in a two-byte pair, it indicates a fairly high sound intensity in a monophonic sound file (this assumes a big-endian representation, which I will do in these examples).

14

Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” 611.

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x In an ASCII–encoded text, it indicates the character ‘(’, namely left parenthesis. x As a single–byte unsigned integer, it corresponds to the number forty. x As the first byte in a 4-byte integer, it indicates a number somewhat more than 670 million. x It could mean that the user pressed Button B on the joystick. x In a computer game, it could mean that the player’s character is a female Orc. Thus the bit pattern 00101000 has no intrinsic meaning: it is purely an abstract pattern. Any meaning has to be supplied explicitly by the programmer/artist. This contrasts with the situation of ordinary visual art, where essentially any marking will automatically call up associations in the mind of a viewer. In my view there are two basic ways in which a pattern of bits in the computer acquires meaning, through “immediate transduction,” and through a “structure of entities and operations.”

Immediate transduction Broadly, a “transducer” is a device that converts one kind of energy into another; for example, a microphone converts sound energy to electrical energy. In the context of computers, I extend the term to cover any device that connects the computer with the outside world. I include microphones, loudspeakers, and electric motors, and also joysticks, computer display screens, and computer printers. The last three are not commonly called transducers; considered in relation to a computer they are called “peripherals.” All of these devices require additional hardware, for example, an analog–to–digital converter, but increasingly the additional hardware is integrated into the computer. Thus, a microphone can be plugged directly into most laptop computers. By “immediate transduction” I mean the situation in which a pattern of bits in the computer has either just been acquired from a transducer or is in the form to be sent to a transducer. If the bit pattern 00101000 appears in a certain location after the user of the computer presses Button B on the joystick, I say that this pattern means that the user pressed Button B. For an example of outward transduction, the artist-programmer may arrange a pattern of bits in certain locations, and then command that this pattern be sent to a display screen, whereupon an image appears on the display. I say that the meaning of the pattern of bits is that displayed image.

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A structure of entities and operations15 A computer has a large number of operations for manipulating data. Some are built into the computer hardware and some are supplied by various software libraries installed on the computer; from the point of view of the programmer, there is not much difference between the two. A large part of what a programmer does is to create new operations by combining existing ones. An example of a structure of operations is given by the operations within the computer of addition, subtraction, etc., applied to patterns of bits regarded as numbers. These operations are, of course, modeled on those of ordinary mathematics and share many of the same properties; for example, it is true of addition both in mathematics and in the computer that a + b = b + a. However, the correspondence is by no means perfect; if we are dealing with two-byte unsigned numbers, then in the computer 65535 + 1 = 0. I call a pattern of bits an “entity” when it is considered in the context of a given set of operations. Thus, a group of 16 bits, that is two bytes, could be acted on by many different operations, but if we are considering a certain set of arithmetic operations, we call a group of 16 bits a two-byte unsigned integer. From the point of view of generative art, the main way that a structure of entities and operations acquires meaning is as the target of a “conceptual metaphor,” as discussed in the next section. I noted above that a programmer creates new operations; equally a programmer creates new entities. One of the aims of “object-oriented programming” is to make this explicit: an “object” in this sense is a pattern of bits together with a set of operations; the programmer creates both together; thus an object in this sense is an entity in my terminology. An entity may contain other entities, so a programmer can build up complex hierarchies.

Conceptual metaphors I take the term “conceptual metaphor” from the book Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. They write:

15 The terminology here is similar to that introduced in Dorin et al., “A framework for understanding generative art”; they discuss generative art in general and refer to “entities” and “processes.” Here I wish to restrict the discussion to operations within the computer, and to emphasize the role of conceptual metaphors.

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Do we systematically use inference patterns from one conceptual domain to reason about another conceptual domain? The empirically established answer is “yes.” We call that phenomenon conceptual metaphor . . . 16

Lakoff and Johnson use the adjective “conceptual” because they stress that these metaphors are not just a matter of language. Such a metaphor is a structural correspondence, not just a matter of assigning names. I use the terminology “source domain” and “target domain” for the two domains connected by a conceptual metaphor.17 Thus, in Lakoff and Johnson’s first example ARGUMENT IS WAR, in which terms from warfare such as “he defended his position” are applied to argument, the source domain is war and the target domain is argument. Computer arithmetic is a conceptual metaphor that, in the style of Lakoff and Johnson, I call “computer arithmetic is arithmetic.” As noted above, the correspondence is not exact, but it is close enough for the same names to be used for operations like addition; the structure of operations of computer arithmetic corresponds fairly closely to the structure of operations in ordinary arithmetic, and in many contexts the difference between the mathematical operations and the operations with the same name in the computer can be ignored. I use the word “correspondence” for the connection between two domains; Lakoff and Johnson use “mapping,” but I wish to reserve “mapping” for another use. With this terminology, we can say that there is a conceptual metaphor linking aspects of the anatomy of a real duck to the internal mechanism of Vaucanson’s Duck. Similarly, there are conceptual metaphors linking the notion of biological reflex to the internal mechanisms of SAM and The Senster. The notion of conceptual metaphor will play a prominent role in the discussion of computer-based works below.

16

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, rev. ed. (1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 246. 17 The terminology “source” and target” is not used in Metaphors We Live By, but it is used in George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,”, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–251.

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Dissonant Particles—an imaginary physics As a case study, I discuss my work Dissonant Particles (2005).18 (Plate 7.1) The sound and images were generated by a computer program that I wrote. A wall text for the work reads as follows: Dissonant Particles is an abstract animation. Psychoacoustic experiments have indicated that when two pure sine tones are played simultaneously, they will sound most dissonant when they are around a semitone apart in pitch. In Dissonant Particles, each particle emits a sine tone. The dissonance between particles acts as a repulsive force which pushes them apart, both in position and in pitch. There is also a long-range (“cosmological”) attractive force that prevents the particles from flying off to infinity. The particles pulsate and slowly evaporate; both of these processes affect the way they “feel” the forces acting on them. The color of a particle indicates pitch: red for low pitches, green for intermediate, and blue for high. The camera tracks one particle, which is always shown in the centre of the screen.

I now analyze this work in the light of the considerations above. The static visual appearance is of a screen with colored disks of various sizes. This is a nonrepresentational abstraction. The observable behavior, as experienced by someone who has not read the wall text, is that the glowing discs move and pulsate, and the gliding sounds appear to be linked to the disks. Again, this observed behavior is a nonrepresentational abstraction. The conceptual behavior is as described in the wall text, and is also a nonrepresentational abstraction, in that there is no such physics, of particles that push each other apart according to the dissonance of the tones they emit, in the world. Inside the computer there are no particles and there is no movement in space. What corresponds to a particle is an entity in my terminology above, a pattern of bits with certain operations defined on it. The pattern of bits consists of various parts, most of which are numbers in the sense that the operations applied to them are those of computer arithmetic. The operations are structured to be the target of a conceptual metaphor, that given in the wall text. Thus, three of the numbers associated with a particle entity are called its “current position,” another group of three its “current 18

Gordon Monro, Dissonant Particles, video on DVD with surround sound, duration 7 minutes. http://www.gommog.com/video/diss_part_video.html.

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velocity.” Another number is called the “mass” of the particle, yet another number the current “frequency of the sound of the particle,” and so on. All the terms in quotation marks, such as “current position,” are labels for entities in the computer that indicate that these entities are the target for a conceptual metaphor whose source is a more detailed version of the wall text given above. The important point is not that the names are taken from the source domain, but that the structural relationships between the entities in the computer reflect those of the source domain. I said above that the conceptual behavior is a nonrepresentational abstraction: there is no physics in the world in which a musical dissonance exerts a repulsive force. However, there are representational elements in the conceptual behavior. Position, velocity, and acceleration in threedimensional space are represented and obey Newton’s law of motion F = ma (force = mass × acceleration). There is also a specific reference in the made-up part of the physics: the “cosmological” attractive force that I introduced to keep the particles from simply scattering in all directions was inspired by Einstein’s cosmological force that opposed the force of gravity at large scales. Since my basic force is repulsive, my “cosmological” force is attractive.

Mappings The fundamental attributes of a particle in Dissonant Particles include a number interpreted as the frequency of the emitted tone, but do not include color. The color of a particle is derived from the frequency; in the language commonly used for such things, I set up a “mapping” from frequency to color. I chose to map high frequencies to blue and low to red, moving around most of the perimeter of a color circle. This was an arbitrary aesthetic decision. It is also another instance of a conceptual metaphor, as the mapping is calculated as part of the computer program and there is no actual color in the computer: precisely, the small pattern of bits that will ultimately be transduced by the DVD player into a perceptible color is derived from the small pattern of bits that will ultimately be transduced into sound of a specific frequency. We can say (using yet another metaphor) that there are two layers of abstraction inside the program. There is the core abstract process in which a particle is characterized by just a few numbers representing its mass, frequency of sound, and so on. Then, still in the program, there is what can be thought of as an “outer” layer where these few numbers are converted into a much larger pattern of bits representing the hundreds of pixels needed to draw the disk corresponding to the particle and the thousands of

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values needed for a short piece of multichannel sound. In the outer layer, the high-level abstract data is converted into a form ready for immediate transduction. In a more complicated work, there may be several layers of abstraction: as one moves outwards one comes closer to data ready for immediate transduction, that is exported from the computer and converted into something we can perceive. Conversely, in an interactive work an action such as pressing a button on a joystick at first manifests itself as a pattern of bits in the outer layer of the program, whence it is converted into some action affecting the core abstract process.

Evolutionary art In this section, I discuss two works that make use of a conceptual metaphor whose source is biological evolution, the artificially evolved images of Karl Sims and Eden by Jon McCormack.

The artificially evolved images of Karl Sims In 1991, Karl Sims published a paper entitled “Artificial evolution for computer graphics” that described several ways of evolving images. 19 Here, I discuss the images shown in Section 5 of that paper. Each of Sims’s images was derived from “DNA” that generated the image. An example from his paper is as follows: (sin (+ (- (grad-direction (blur (if (hsv-to-rgb (warped-color-noise #(0.57 0.73 0.92) (/ 1.85 (warped- color-noise x y 0.02 3.08)) 0.11 2.4)) #(0.54 0.73 0.59) #(1.06 0.82 0.06)) 3.1) 1.46 5.9) (hsv-to-rgb (warped-colornoise y (/ 4.5 (warped-color-noise y (/ x y) 2.4 2.4)) 0.02 2.4))) x))

This is effectively a mathematical formula (expressed in the programming language LISP) that calculates the image pixel by pixel. Sims created the “DNA” indirectly, by a process analogous to evolution in nature. He applied random mutation operations to existing DNA to create new DNA, and he also mixed two pieces of DNA together, thus creating offspring from two parents. In place of natural selection, Sims used so-called “aesthetic selection”: he chose images that he liked to

19

Karl Sims, “Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics,” Computer Graphics 25 no. 4 (1991) (SIGGRAPH ’91 Proceedings): 319–328.

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be the progenitors of the next generation. Images that were not chosen were deleted from the population. If we take the images described in Sims’s paper as the artistic product, then the static visual appearance is abstract. Since Sims was steering the evolution by choosing images that he liked, he could steer it in a more geometric or more biomorphic direction, but the images are essentially not representational. There is no observable behavior, as these are just static images. But there is a considerable inner aspect to the work, which I call biomorphic, as it is the target of a conceptual metaphor whose source is evolution in nature (see table 8.1). It is this conceptual metaphor that justifies the word “evolution” in the title of Sims’s paper. Natural world (source domain) DNA Creature Breeding (combines DNA from two parents) Mutation (changes DNA) Natural selection Birth and death

Sim’s images (target domain) “DNA” (small formulas) Generated image Breeding Mutation Selection by Sims (“aesthetic selection”) The images are “born” and are culled (die) if not selected

Table 7.1. Comparison between evolution in the natural world and Sims’s artificially evolved images

Eden by Jon McCormack Jon McCormack’s evolutionary work Eden: An Evolutionary Sonic Ecosystem (2000; Plate 7.2).20 is structurally more complex than Sims’s work. Whereas in Sims’s work the images were passive, acted on by operations of breeding and mutation, McCormack has active “agents” or “virtual creatures” in his program seeking food and mates in a fairly complex virtual environment. In addition, in place of Sims’s aesthetic selection of survivors, McCormack’s world has an automatic selection in the form of “survival of the fittest.” There is an indirect influence from viewers of the work, in that the location and speed of movement of 20

Jon McCormack, “Evolving Sonic Ecosystems,” Kybernetes 32 no. 1 (2003): 184–202.

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viewers of the work affect the amount of food and the mutation rate of the virtual creatures, but there is no direct selection by visitors. The static visual appearance of Eden is abstract, consisting just of circles and wavy lines. The observed behavior is also abstract: the display changes and sound is heard. The sound is reminiscent of electronic music. The inner aspect is complex. The agents communicate by (abstracted) sound; this abstracted sound is translated into real sound via a mapping in the computer program. There is no sound track in the usual sense; instead the sound is generated by the ongoing interactions of the agents. The agents have “brains” in the form of systems of rules that can change, that is the agents can learn. Finally, there is an evolutionary process involving breeding and mutation. There are several layers of conceptual metaphor in the work. At a basic level, space and time are discrete: there are discrete locations called “cells” that can contain one or more agents, and time moves in discrete timesteps. The discreteness of time and space is drawn not from nature, but from the digital nature of the computer; originally this was done from expediency, but it has developed into a tradition of its own. The agents, with the associated ideas of birth and death, eating, fighting and mating, communication and learning, are inspired by the natural world, though not from any specific existing creatures; this metaphor is the central part of the work, and so I describe it as biomorphic. The evolution is interesting in that it is not modeled on evolution in the natural world; it is based on the Lamarckian idea from the early nineteenth century that characteristics acquired by an organism can be inherited by its progeny.21 This is now known not to occur except in very marginal cases; the evolution in Eden represents an obsolete scientific theory rather than current scientific knowledge of the world.

Representation and abstraction in computer games Computer games are the most common cultural artefacts exhibiting elaborate behaviors. They can be found right across the representation/abstraction spectrum.

21

The current understanding of the term “Lamarckian” may not be fair to Lamarck. See Sandra Knapp, “Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics” in The Great Naturalists, ed. Robert Huxley (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 190–196.

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Text-based adventure games A prominent class of early computer games is that of text-based adventure games. In these, the user types commands into the computer and the computer responds with a text-based description of the scene and the results of the command. For example: User: Go North Computer: Beside the Wall The trail from the south ends here. Above, the wall seems to fuse itself to the side of a mountain. Making it impossible to move around it. There is a strange feeling of tension in the atmosphere. User: Open wall. Computer: I see no wall here.22

With such games, there is no static visual appearance. The observable behavior consists of the responses the computer makes to commands. The inner aspect is the “world” maintained by the computer: the computer keeps track of which location the player is in, what the player is carrying, and the like. This is representational abstraction. However, the descriptions of the locations in the game, such as the location “Beside the Wall” above, do not correspond to anything represented in the program: as far as the program is concerned, the description is a meaningless string of characters to be emitted when the player reaches the location. This leads to incongruities such as that above, where the description mentions a wall, but when the player tries to interact with the wall, the computer replies “I see no wall here.” The wall is not represented in the computer program. The very skeletal (i.e. highly abstracted) representation of the game world inside the computer is thus inadvertently exposed.

Tetris The game Tetris23 is an example of nonrepresentational abstraction. In this game, colored “tetrominoes” consisting of four squares joined together descend from the top of the screen. The player can rotate a falling 22

Example obtained from http://www.student.oulu.fi/~miputkon/alhazi/archive/ reroll.log.txt. 23 Originally developed by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 using text symbols; the graphics followed soon after. See Vadim Gerasimov, “Tetris Story,” http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm. Gerasimov was one of the early developers of Tetris.

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tetromino by pressing buttons, and when it reaches piled-up tetrominoes at the bottom of the screen it sticks to them. If a complete line of squares is formed across the screen, the whole line vanishes, and any pieces above the line move down. The game ends when the piled-up tetrominoes reach the top of the screen. In Tetris, the static visual appearance is nonrepresentational, consisting of colored squares; the observed behavior is essentially nonrepresentational: the most important feature is the vanishing of a complete line of squares, which is not based on anything in the world. The falling down the screen is, of course, inspired by gravity, but the objects move in discrete time steps with a constant distance per step; the acceleration induced by real gravity is not represented. The inner aspect in Tetris is fully revealed in the observed behavior; the conceptual metaphor for Tetris is that given in the above description of the behavior of the game.

The role-playing game Skyrim Computer games like Skyrim24 can be considered as remote descendants of the text-based adventure games, though the genre represented by Skyrim also has origins in non-computer games of the Dungeons and Dragons type, involving pencil, paper, and rolling of dice. In Skyrim, the visual appearance is strongly representational, with grass, trees, roads, castles, and mountains, and also humans, wolves, orcs, and dragons. The observable behavior is also representational. Time runs continuously and characters in the game can move about in threedimensional space, pick up objects, fire arrows, cast magic spells, and so forth. The main conceptual metaphor is thus representational, to quite a detailed degree. Nonetheless, there are aspects of the game mechanics that are less representational. In a fight, the “health” of the player’s character is represented by a single number; “health” is a highly abstracted concept. Movement in Skyrim is controlled by an invisible mesh of triangles laid over the ground: this mesh is nonrepresentational in that it has no counterpart in the natural world. A substantial part of the game mechanics is nonrepresentational.

24

Bethesda Softworks, “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” http://bethsoft.com/enus/games/skyrim.

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Conclusion A work such as Calder’s The Lace on the Edge of Your Panties has both a static visual appearance and an observable behavior, and these may have different positions on the representation/abstraction spectrum. Beyond this, the more complex works discussed have an outer aspect consisting of both the static visual appearance and the observable behavior and an inner aspect, the hidden mechanism, which in current work is likely to be a computer program. The operations of a computer program are completely abstract in that they consist of manipulating patterns of bits that are meaningless in themselves; I argue that they acquire meaning principally by being the target of a conceptual metaphor. The source of the conceptual metaphor may itself be essentially nonrepresentational, as with Tetris, or representational, as in the evolutionary metaphor in Sims’s work. Thus, in the more complex works, there are three things to consider: the static visual appearance, the observable behavior, and the hidden mechanism. Each of these three may have an independent relationship to the representation/abstraction spectrum, and each may have its own web of references and allusions: this richness brings new possibilities for art.

CHAPTER EIGHT DIGITAL ABSTRACTION: MODELING INTERSENSORY PERCEPTION IN ELECTRONIC ART BIRGIT MERSMANN

The algorithm becomes an endlessly variable and dynamic intermediary between sound and image.1 (Mitchell Whitelaw)

The use of digital media technologies and new methods of data visualization by contemporary artists has sparked a novel interest in abstract art, in particular the premises and practices of abstraction as a universal language or programming code. Through the process of crossfertilization between digital media, science, and art, a new form of digital abstraction has evolved. Whereas modern (analog) abstraction was induced by the modern scientific paradigm of atomization and universalization, digital abstraction is informed by the new network paradigm of complexity reduction. “If modernist art followed modern science in reducing the medium of art—as well as our sensorial experiences and ontological and epistemological models of reality—to basic elements and simple structures, contemporary software abstraction instead recognizes the essential complexity of the world.”2 In the artistic field, the reawakened interest in synesthesia3 has most directly established

1

Mitchell Whitelaw, “Synesthesia and Cross-modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals,” in The Senses and Society 3/3 (2008): 259. 2 Lev Manovich, “Abstraction and Complexity,” in Media Histories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge/London: MIT Press), 346. 3 For a comprehensive overview, see Crétien van Campen’s Bibliography: Synasthesia in Art and Science, http://leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/synesthesiabib.html.

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a new link between modern and postmodern, analog and digital abstraction. The seemingly media-independent perceptual continuity from analog to digital abstraction, constituted via the path of synesthetics, can best be exemplified by two philosophical statements that underpin the fusional potential of sensory perception. The first stems from the predigital age. It was uttered by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer whose primary research interest was focused on the understanding of how humans mold their sensory perceptions into symbolic forms and meanings. According to his view, “[e]very sensory perception is an act of fusion and reunification.”4 The second statement was voiced in the digital age with reference to digital technology. The Canadian media philosopher and sociologist Brian Massumi provocatively claimed that “the digital isn’t a medium. . . . Digital technology is an expanding network of connective and fusional potential. You can take an input in any sense modality, and translate or transduce it into another, say sound into image.”5 Whereas the first statement by Cassirer includes a transcendental dimension in the hyper-binding of different sense modalities, the second statement by Massumi emphasizes the technical dimension of cross-sensorial translatability. The experience of synesthesia, shared by many modern abstract artists such as Kandinsky 6 and shaped into a cross-sensorial 4

Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1972), 148. 5 Brian Massumi, “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens,” INFLeXions No. 1. How is Research–Creation? (May 2008): 35, http://www.inflexions.org/n1_ massumihtml.html. 6 In the affluent literature on the question whether Kandinsky was a synesthete or not (Amy Ione and Christopher Tyler, “Neurohistory and the Arts: Was Kandinsky a Synesthete?,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12/2 (2003): 223– 226), mostly two statements are cited as a proof that he experienced synesthete sensations and built on it for enhancing cross-modal sensitivity of art creation and perception. One of the first and most formative intersensorial experiences was evoked by a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin in Moscow in 1896: “The violins, the deep tones of the basses and especially that wind instruments at the time embodied for me all the power of that prenocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” (Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” (1913), in Kandinsky. Complete Writings on Art, London: Faber & Faber, 1982, 364). That this cross-modal experience is reshaped into an (inter-)active artistic strategy of “color sonification” can be documented by an often-cited passage from Concerning the Spritual in Art: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching

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interart aesthetics, surprisingly converges with Brian Massumi’s definition of “the digital” as the connective and fusional potential of translating and transducing one sense modality into another.7 Drawing upon the connection between abstraction, synesthetics and digitality, this paper will take multisensory experience as a point of departure for analyzing the creation of digital abstraction, its modeling and conditioning, in the realm of the visual electronic arts. By studying works of contemporary electronic media artists from different cultural backgrounds—including US-based artist Golan Levin, Hong-Kong-based artist Hung Keung, and Korea-based artist Kim Kichul— it will investigate the simultaneous translations and mutual transitions between sensory perceptions and expressions on different modal complexity levels such as speaking and writing, listening and reading, sounding and hearing, visualizing and viewing, touching and sensing. The purpose of this intersensorial transcoding analysis is threefold: 1) to find out whether a new art theory of digital abstraction can be built on the category and concept of hypermodality, as proposed by Jay Lemke,8 2) to explore the connectivity between digital abstraction and digital embodiment, and 3) to venture into digital synaesthetics as a new experimental form of abstract codification of inter- and hypersensory perception. Because the spectrum of crosssensorial transductions is very comprehensive, the analytical focus of this primary visual study will be laid on the exemplification of the following three translation modes of sensorial transcoding as new forms of digital visual abstraction: 1) In-situ visualization of writing, 2) In-situ visualization of speech, and 3) In-situ visualization of sound. Before beginning with the cross-modal analysis of digital visual abstraction, let me add some general remarks as to where to position this study in the emerging field of intersensorial art and intermedia studies, including the revived research on synaesthetics. In its strict scientific definition, synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon: the involuntary physical experience of cross-modal association. This is why, following the argumentation of Paul Hertz, only persons, but not artworks can be synesthetic: “Synesthetic art is a deliberate contrivance, the product of an artistic aspiration, and we should not confuse it with the neurological one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Part II: Painting. The Psychological Working of Color, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5321/pg5321.html). 7 Massumi 2008: 35. 8 Jay Lemke, “Travels in Hypermodality,” Visual Communication 1/3 (2002): 299– 325.

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phenomenon of synaesthesia. Persons, not artworks, are synesthetic. Ultimately, there is no such thing as synesthetic art—but that has not stopped anyone from trying to create it.”9 The fusing and synchronizing of the multiple senses facilitated by computer programming was most seductive in establishing the category of “synesthetic art” as a determining element of digital art. “Computers, which offer the possibility of controlling and synchronizing different media and implementing highly abstract compositional structures across media, seem an ideal tool for synesthetic art.”10 In the same line of argumentation, the concept of media synesthetics was introduced as a complement to and key enabler of synesthetic (inter)media art. However, media are not synesthetic themselves, but allow for synesthetic perceptual experiences. It is of crucial importance to differentiate between medialities and modalities and look carefully how they relate to and interact with each other. Only this way, a new digital synaesthetics as aesthetic theory of sensorial transcoding and hyperbinding can be convincingly developed. The path towards the achievement of this target is long and stony, given the fact that the traditional hierarchy of the senses together with the common privileging of one specific sense has to be overcome. The electronic artworks presented in the following prove evidence that, with regard to their technological development stage, it would be more appropriate to assign them to a “heteroaisthetics,” because they demonstrate the experimental phase of how to artistically and technologically model crossmodality and intersensoriality while often leaving the beholder/user in a state of perceptual irritation, destabilization, or even alienation.

Syn(es)thesizing script: Hypermodal dimensions of programed writing (Trans-)scribing the body: intersensorial as intercorporal communication In view of its abstract visual language, the interactive installation Ghost Pole Propagator (2007) (Plate 8.1) by the US-American media artist Golan Levin expresses the pictographic trend triggered off by digital 9

Paul Hertz, “Synesthetic Art—An Imaginary Number?,” Leonardo 32/5 (1999): 400. 10 Ibid., 399.

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writing culture and its new means of interactive communication. The original version of the installation was designed for projection in the thirteenth century Belsay Castle Hall in Newcastle, England, as part of the Picture House exhibition. The work presents a ghostlike transcription of the visitors moving in the exhibition space, capturing and replaying the abstracted skeletons of its own observers. Viewers are interactively confronted with the real-time images of their own body movements abstracted to stick-figures, but also with the animated skeletons of previous visitors. Projected simultaneously onto the historical stone wall of the castle, the human stick-figures are suggestive of the ancient petroglyphs of the British Isles. By this process of transcription, the work performs the introduction of so-called “real characters”—the creation of which has been a major ambition in the history of universal writing projects. The movements and gestures of a real object, the body, are caught in real time and real space, thus transcribing the body character into real characters—the pictographs of the human figure. This transmission process is activated by the interactive art installation, serving the function of a transcoder for the creation of (virtual) universal communication among humans. This virtual experience of script animation is more explicitly emphasized in the interactive installation Bloated City/Skinny Language by the Hong-Kong Chinese media artist Hung Keung. (Plate 8.2) Dating from 2007, it reflects the technological advancements in the field of interactive computer animation. The work presents itself as an allegory on “new” China, driven by radical economic modernization. The change process is visualized on the basis of Chinese writing, its reform history. The divide between traditional and modern writing, that is complex and simplified Chinese characters, is highlighted in the form of two juxtaposed screens that allow for an immediate experiential comparison between the old and new Chinese system. The viewer, standing and moving in front of the screen installation, is recorded in real-time. He or she is confronted with his/her self-image in life action, run over by animated Chinese characters that move like insects. The moving behavior of these characters on the left screen differs principally from that on the right screen. The more the viewer tries to move away from his/her own projection image on the left side, the quicker the characters follow him/her. However, an escape movement on the right side allows the viewer to at least temporarily flee the relatively slowly moving swarm of characters. It was a central motivation of the artist to make the viewer bodily experience the contradictions between move-on and stand-still, approaching and distancing. Like new China, the new

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writing is on the leap. Through strong inter-sensory body experience, the installation seeks to evoke the new mobility and visual interaction capacity of writing, the feeling of “characters on the move.” Yet, the transcribing of the body is characterized by a paradox. The bodily performed withdrawal from writing, here from the rich Chinese writing tradition, results in a virtual-real revival of writing. The characters of Bloated City/Skinny Language show off a very aggressive behavior.11 The script unfolds an enormous power in itself, an insect-like life of its own. It captures the body in communication with it, casts a textile web around it, inscribes into it. The entanglement in Chinese writing becomes the symbol for a society caught in the dilemma between tradition and renewal, continuity and change. Thus, the power of persecution of the characters also implies a critique of writing: not to forget the rich cultural heritage of Chinese writing and its related writing culture over the rapid societal transformations in the age of digital abstraction.

In-situ visualization of gestural writing and typography Hand movements, including handwriting, are often involved in digital writing as a programming process. This has to do with the fact that the hand is employed as an interface tool. By way of manual impulses, gestural aspects of writing are revived. The Manual Input Session (2004), an interactive installation and performance realized by Golan Levin in cooperation with Zachary Lieberman, demonstrates the digitally augmented possibilities of handwriting as gestural writing and movement script. They are reminiscent of modern experiments in gestural abstraction, as found in American abstract expressionism and French tachism and Informel.12 Scribbling as a manual form of pre-, proto- or even post-writing is transcribed into picto-sono-graphics. This result is attained by the synthesizing of analog and digital image recognition and transmission. 11 This aggressive script animation stands in stark contrast to softer modes of insitu visualization of writing. In the interactive script installation Textrain (1999) by the video installation artist Camille Utterback for instance, the viewer is animated to tenderly, almost erotically play with writing by catching letters “raining” over the screen and thus forming text particles. 12 On forms of scriptural abstraction as a subcategory of gestural abstraction, see Birgit Mersmann, “Nature’s Hand: Writing Abstraction in the Work of Henri Michaux,” in Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory, ed. Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche (New York/London: Routledge, 2012), 198–216.

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During the performance, a computer vision system analyses the silhouettes of the performers’ hands as they scribble on transparencies, and move across the glass tops of the overhead projectors. The hand gestures and transparency drawings are then analysed by custom software. In response, the software generates synthetic graphics and sounds that are tightly coupled to the forms and movements of the performers’ actions. The synthetic responses are co-projected over the organic, analog shadows, resulting in an almost magical form of augmented-reality shadow play.13

The hypermodal configuration of the audiovisual performance manifests itself in the production of sounds from shapes created by the performers’ hand actions. 14 It is as if the performers would direct the audiovisual concert by the magic silhouette play of their hands. The Alphabet Synthesis Machine, created in 2001 by Golan Levin, Jonathan Feinberg, and Cassidy Curtis for Art21 in New York and The Arts Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, refines the digital synthesizing of script on the level of the writing system, although it maintains the manual input of handwriting as primary design source. Constructed as interactive online artwork, the Alphabet Synthesis Machine allows users to guide “an evolutionary genetic algorithm in order to create and explore coherent sets of abstract glyphs.”15 The abstract, imaginary alphabets, or in more neutral terms, graphic sign inventories of virtual writing systems (Fig. 8.1), can be downloaded as PC-format TrueType fonts at both the time of its creation, or at any future time from an online archive in which the users’ script creations are permanently stored. With regard to the technical realization of the project, it becomes manifest that

13

Quoted according to the work description by the artist under http://www.tmema.org/mis/. 14 Mainly three software instruments have been used to produce the gestural concert: NegDrop, InnerStamp, and Rotuni. By use of the NegDrop instruments, interior contours become droppable virtual objects which emit sounds when they collide with the boundaries of the overhead projection. InnerStamp enables interior contours to persist after being created. The Rotuni software instrument allows for the generation of a rhythmic melody for each positive silhouette contour. For a detailed explanation of these software instruments, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, “Sounds from Shapes: Audiovisual Performance with Hand Silhouette Contours in ‘The Manual Input Sessions’,” Proceedings of NIME ’05 (2005), Vancouver, BC, Canada, http://www.flong.com/storage/pdf/articles/NIME_2005c_MIS.pdf. 15 Cit. following http://www.alphabetsynthesis.com/, accessed September 11, 2013.

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the concept of genetic arrt as self-prod ducing art is applied to the genesis and evolutioon of writing: orithm At the heart of the interaactive applet is a genetic algorrithm. This algo attempts tto evolve a poppulation of can ndidate glyphs according to a set of fitness m metrics establishhed by the userr. Some of thesse fitness metriics are obtained ffrom an initial “seed glyph” prrovided by the uuser, while others are controlledd by the user inn real-time, thro ough a set of pparametric slideers and other interface controlss. The glyphs are evolved both as indiv viduals a ideal metric, in order to enhhance their indiividual (i.e. each in relation to an “letternesss”), and also as a a species (i.e. each in conttradistinction to o each other, in oorder to enhancce the variety off the alphabet ass a whole).16

Figure 8.1. F Free characters produced wiith Golan Levvin’s Alphabet Synthesis Machine. Coppyright Golan Levin. L

16

Cit. follow wing http://ww ww.alphabetsyn nthesis.com/, aaccessed Septeember 11, 2013.

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As already mentioned, the creational action of the writing/drawing hand gives the defining impulses for the generation of the glyphs: The glyphs themselves are the virtual trajectories of synthetic hand movements, produced by a 3-dimensional physics simulation of a handpen-paper system. This model incorporates such forces as the response of hand muscles to neural firing rates; the inertia and intrinsic viscosity of the arm; gravity; and the friction of the stylus against the virtual writing surface.17

This complex technical construction is set up to prove that digital technology is also capable of capturing and visualizing the subtleties of abstract manual gestures involved in (hand)writing. Particular about the scripts produced by the Alphabet Synthesis Machine is that they are not (or not yet) intelligible. They are iconoscriptures 18 in their most definite iconic form, since they purely consist of visual graphs that lie beyond, or more precisely, before any language and linguistic meaning. For the artist himself, the allurement of these iconoscriptures lies in their belonging to a realm beyond language that is characterized by what he calls “visual semisense.” Due to the abstractness of the glyphs, a visual sense—as it is evoked by the classical pictogram—can’t be constituted; but because the graphic signs are designed as a set of glyphs, reminiscent of a writing inventory, they strongly appeal to the making of sense. The artist’s goal to study these iconoscriptural sets of semi-sense is to “come to a deeper understanding of precisely how sense-making occurs at all.”19 With the help of written software, the process of script design and potential meaning production is simulated. In that respect, the script-genetic art project of the Alphabet Synthesis Machine can also be classified as a semiserious research experiment on the invention and evolution of writing in human civilization. An art experiment with a similar motivation to algorithmically generate the evolution of writing has been undertaken by the Californian linguist, typographer, and programmer Matt Chisholm in his project Alphabet Soup (2001).20 In contrast to Golan Levin’s Alphabet Synthesis 17

Ibid. Birgit Mersmann, “Ikonoskripturen. Mediale Symbiosen zwischen Bild und Schrift in Roland Barthes’s L’empire des signes,” in Sehen ist wie Lesen. Intermediale Zitate in Bild und Text, ed. Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard (Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 2006), 17. 19 Ibid. 20 For the work, see https://theory.org/artprojects/alphabetsoup/main.html. 18

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Machine which emphasizes the handwritten gestural mode of production, the Alphabet Soup project departs from typography as a playground for algorithmic script generation. The linguistic goal of this project is to develop a “universal grammar,” or more precisely, devise a universal grammatology of European orthography by programming an alphabet synthesis. With this vision, Alphabet Soup presents itself as one of the, historically speaking, rare projects of universal typographic writing systems, only technically enabled by the programmable composite modularities of the computer. Generated by a computer, hypotheses are produced about what basic graphic forms are needed in order to be able to set up all forms of existing letters as they are found in the different alphabetical writing systems confined to Europe. So far, Chisholm has included the Latin alphabet, Arab numbers in upper and lower cases, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and parts of the Greek alphabet in upper case in the typographical analysis. The project relies on fixed rules for a typographical, principally expandable syntax with the help of which clear program instructions about the composition of the letters can be given. As a result, a correspondent typographic-syntactic rule is composed of 1. the initial stage of the graph or graphic nucleus, and 2. a list with further construction phases that provides insight into how the construction of the initial graph is continued, whether graphs are added horizontally and/or vertically and up to which distance. The graphical key units from which the alphabetical universal letters are to be constructed have been designed by the artist himself using standard serif fonts such as Times. The graphical composite modules through the combination of which the alphabetically-synthesized letters emerge are produced by the application of the programming language Python and the related Imaging Program. The typographical result looks both familiar and unfamiliar. Although the new universal alphabetical writing is visually recognizable and a general readability of words and sentences is given, it looks transcoded, like a foreign, un-deciphered alphabetical writing system. Once again, we are confronted with a visuo-graphical semi-meaning of symbols, already characteristic for the Alphabet Synthesis Machine. Reading irritations and comprehension difficulties mostly occur during the icono-graphic transcoding. The sentences on the basis of which the typographic alphabet synthesis is illustrated are manifesto-like phrases. They are more than explicit about the digital transformations to which the type-set and orthographic system is subjugated. In a paradoxical turn, namely in the image of the new, digitally synthesized typoscript, typography is declared dead and the boredom of the Unicode is complained about.

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Rather informative is a close look at which graphic signs the Alphabet Soup project deliberately spares when formulating rules and hypotheses for the development of a universal grammatography.21 Beside punctuation signs, special symbols, mathematical symbols, diacritical signs, type-based notation signs, and ligatures, these are to a large extent the characters of non-European writing systems as hieroglyphic graphs and ideographic characters, as well as handwritten signs. There is a good reason for the renouncement on these graphic sign types: Due to their higher graphical complexity, they present a particular challenge for graphic programming. Therefore, the typographical transcription experiment is, at the given time of its production, still limited to alphabetic writing as the by far most reduced system of graphs. This shows that digital abstraction has to be understood and developed as a tool of complexity reduction.

In-situ visualization of speech Whereas the Alphabet Synthesis Machine was developed by Golan Levin with the target to enable the in-situ visualization of writing as graphic design process, the artistic project Hidden Worlds (2002) with its companion piece RE:MARK and Ursonography (2005) aimed at the converse process of digital transcription, that is in-situ speech visualization. It is more than natural that forms of iconic writing pop up when it comes to the visualization of speech, since it is writing, in its most advanced and consistent form of alphabetic writing as relatively pure phonetic writing that serves the traditional linguistic function of visually representing spoken language. The multimedia performance Ursonography commissioned by the 2005 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, is a very representative example for demonstrating that digital speech visualization results in new crossmodal forms of iconoscriptures. The work has been conceived as a new audiovisual adaptation and interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ famous Ursonate, a piece of concrete sound poetry that has written history as vanguard forerunner of audiovisual media and performance art.

21

The term “grammatography޵, originally coined by Derrida in his Of Grammatology, more precisely refers to the graphic mode of the new type of digital writing. On Derrida’s vision to move from grammatology to grammatography, R. Julius Mühlemann, “Derridas Metaphysikkritik. Von der Grammatologie zur Grammatographie,޵ 1997, http://www.phil-o-sophie.ch/ dokumente/arbeitderrida1.htm (link deactivated).

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In Ursonography, the live performance of the Ursonate by the virtuous Dutch sound poet and vocalist Jaap Blonk is multimodally augmented by the use of computer-based speech recognition, including a real-time syllable detector, combined with score-following techniques that allow the simultaneous visualization of the sounds produced by the interpreter on stage. The sounds are visually displayed on a projection screen as realtime written subtitles. The visuo-phonetic transcription of the liveproduced sounds is animated: letters, among them punctuation marks, are wildly moving or smoothly floating around in the visual, topographical space of the projection screen, directly depicting the timing, sound volume, and timbre of Blonk’s vocalizing in dynamic typographic transformations. As Roland Barthes was obsessed by “seeing language,” so is Ursonography by “seeing sound.” The poem Ursonate can be seen in a new sono-iconic way that allows the viewer/listener the crossmodal perception and interpretation of the piece. It is exactly by this technological enhancement of semiotic transcoding that Golan Levin’s ursonographic project sheds new “digital” light on the early typographic experiments of avant-garde art, in particular lettrism which pursued similar goals of speech visualization. The installation RE:MARK presents a similar, but more analytic attempt to visualize speech that is naturally invisible: . . . sounds spoken into a pair of microphones are analyzed and classified by a phoneme recognition system. When a phoneme is recognized with sufficient confidence, the written name of the phoneme (for example, oh, ee, ah, etc.) is projected on the installation’s display. If the user’s sound is not recognized by the system’s classifier, then an abstract shape is generated instead, according to parameters derived from the timbral (spectral and formant) characteristics of the vocalization. Among other mappings, sounds with high-frequency spectral centroids are represented with pointier, more irregular forms.22

An important element of this interactive sound-iconics is the in situ visualization, referring to the animation of the transcribed phonemes and sounds in such a way that they appear to emerge from the mouth of the performing speaker. This is realized by using a speech analysis system in 22

Description of the work by the artist in Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, “In Situ Speech Visualization in Real–Time Interactive Installation and Performance,” The 3rd International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, Annecy, France, 2004, http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/class/cs598kgk-04/papers/messa_NPAR_2004_150dpi.pdf.

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combination with a computer-vision system that estimates the location of the user’s mouth in relation to the head silhouette projected onto the screen. What RE:MARK evidences by the combined usage of complex transcoding technologies is the threshold of phonetic recognition. It illustrates the gray zone between sub- or prephonetic and phonetic comprehension, semi-recognition and full recognition as transitional differences between graphic shapes and graphic signs, that is letter forms. The title RE:MARK intriguingly reflects this phonetic threshold as writing threshold since it implies the return—or reversal—of a remark as spoken utterance to/wards a mark as graphic marking, a point of origin from which writing historically evolved. In that sense, it is also symbolic for the early stage of digital (trans)writing with its multimodal analytical processing.

Seeing hearing: The hypermodal modeling of sound The work of the Korean media artist Kim Kichul explores the crossmodality of sound in multidimensional ways. Connective work titles such as Sound Talking, Sound Drawing, and Sound Looking indicate Kim’s artistic ambition to fuse different active and passive sense modalities, that is: to let sound speak, or draw, or look. His own selfunderstanding as sound sculptor reveals that his primary goal is to embody, materialize, and visualize the abstract, immaterial and transient qualities of sound. According to a statement by the artist, the idea to use sound as a medium for artistic creation was inspired by the Buddhist figure of the Bodhisattva Avalokite’svara (Holder of the Lotus, Lord of the World). It was initiated by a kind of synesthetic experience—the looking at radio sound. His first sound artwork entitled 11–Faced Avalokite’svara (1993) was derived from his own experience of feeling as though I were looking at the actual physical sound coming from a radio. While questioning what it meant to actually see something, I was inspired by the word Avalokite’svara which (translated in the Sino-Korean characters Kwan Eum) means “to see the sound.” What struck the chord within was a verse from Bomunpum—the 25th chapter of The Sutra of the Lotus which stated that if Sattva, in their suffering, chanted the Avalokite’svara with a simple concentration, they could reach to Nirvana. I therefore placed 10 statues of Avalokite’svara each on the radios tuned

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A later version of the 11–Faced Bodhisattva from 2007, entitled Sound Talking, makes clear that the Buddhist principle of kwan eum, of “seeing sound,” has been developed into an artistic method how to make the sensory experience of varying forms and modalities of sound, including sound production and sound perception, visible. This time, the interactive component is strengthened in the setup in order to allow for a direct and personalized intersensorial experience of “seeing voices.” The installation animates the beholder to use the microphone positioned in front of the Eleven–Faced Bodhisattva Kwan Eum: He can talk to his own voice, his own Bodhisattva, and look at the sound talking when it turns into a resonating image, an echo of imagination traveling back to him. The idea of individually embodied sound- and voice-images is emphasized in the artist’s comment on Sound Talking: As your voice differs from mine, my Bodhisattva of compassion differs from the figure of your resonating Bodhisattva of compassion. The image is one although my definition of Bodhisattva of compassion differs from the picture of your Bodhisattva in thoughts. Am I still wandering around when the method of seeing sound is just in front of me?24

The intersensorial experience of “sound looking” is molded into a sound sculpture with the same title (1999–2003).25 The sound installation consists of a flexiglass pipe equipped with a loudspeaker fixed at one end. The floor of the glass tube is covered with styrofoam balls. Once the drone sound of specific sine waves starts, the styrofoam balls are set into motion, they are vibrating and quivering according to the audio frequency, visualizing the sound waves. Since the tube is 250 mm long, a tone of 250 Hertz creates a jittering wave; at a tone frequency of 155 Hertz, two waves are formed.

23

Kim cit. in Won-Seok Koh,“Kim Kichul: Illuminating the Brilliance of Life,” SPACE Magazine (2010): n.p, http://www.vmspace.com/eng/sub_emagazine_ view.asp?category=people&idx=10726. 24 Kichul Kim, “Sound Talking—Eleven-Faced Bodhisattva Kwan Eum. Artist Statement, Artworks 03,” Intermediae Minbak (2007): n.p., http://test.nabi.or.kr/site/project/2007/minbak_eng/index.html. 25 For a demonstration of Sound Looking, see the video under http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBP0jmpjzBw, accessed September 23, 2013.

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Kim works with different kinds of sound: electronically amplified, but not overly manipulated sounds, sounds of instruments (including the Korean temple bell), sounds of nature, environmental soundscapes, the human voice, etc. In principle, he is not composing own sounds for his audio-visual installations, but using field recordings. The interconnectivity between sound and image is clearly evidenced in Sound Looking: We look at how sine waves of sound, basically invisible, are made visible, being transformed into visuo-spatial representations that gain figurative plasticity. They grow into abstract audio-figures, moving and dancing rhythmically to the sound stream. A philosophically more elaborate conceptual piece of the Sound Looking series is the sound installation Sound Looking—Rain (2007). 26 While immersing into the nature of perception in relation to the Buddhist concept of emptiness, the work follows up on the search for Nirvana, as already audio-visualized in Eleven–Faced Bodhisattva Kwan Eum. A matrix of wired audio speakers is hanging from the ceiling, all of them at equal height. Field recordings of falling rain form a sound collage that penetrates the gallery space. The soundscape activates cross-modal sensory perceptions. It enables to float between the opposing senses of sight and sound, to look at the natural sound of rain. The listener believes not only to see, but also to sense the falling rain. This multisensory perception involves full embodiment. The virtual rain environment is realized by minimalistic transcoding effects: The opening of the audio speakers is oriented toward the ceiling as if they would catch the falling rain drops. The bundle of light-reflecting wires to which the audio speakers are fixed suggests the line image of falling rain, the trembling of the audio-speakers is suggestive of the movements and turbulences on the surface of the rain water, imaginarily collected in the audio-vessels. It is the sound-effect that sets off the image-effect of seeing the soundscape of rain that actually remains invisible. In one version of the installation Sound Looking—Rain, the audiospeakers’ ambience is arranged in front of a bamboo grove projection, thus enforcing the imagination of a natural embodied perception of rain in the midst of nature. That Kim’s sound projects give prior importance to embedded perception and embodied experience is reflected in the setting of the audio sources used for shaping his sound sculptures and installations. In Looking Water for instance, the recordings of water do not only relate to different natural forms and formations of water (ocean 26

For a demonstration of Sound Looking, see the video under http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBP0jmpjzBw, accessed September 23, 2013.

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waves, cascade etc.), but also to clearly defined sources such as a particular fountain in North Korea or the Izu Beach in Japan. According to Kim, “the place of a sound has a more direct relationship with the nature of the sound.” Therefore, “the given context in the process of collecting the sound functions as an essential element in conceiving the work.”27 The in-situ visualization of sound is thus complemented by the visualization of in-situ sound, that is embedded, environmentally shaped sound. Another intersensorial experience is performed in the Sound Drawings.28 Their sound design was intended to reveal the sonoric power of drawings and paintings. Kim was fascinated by rendering the naturally impossible virtually possible, that is to create a visible trace of sound: “Whereas a picture leaves a trace, a sound doesn’t. I want to create a trace of sound. Although sound is marked on an audiotape or on a Compact Disc, it cannot be seen. I think I need a system that can show the sound and can draw as well.”29 For the work group of the Sound Drawings, such a system was successfully developed, consisting of a piece of paper on a wooden desk (or alternatively a wall) with a graphite pencil, a tone generator, and an amplifier. It is an interactive media system that allows for both the creation of sounds by drawing on paper and the listening to already created, pre-drawn sounds by scanning their visible traces. The user can create his/her own instrument, or play back what others have “composed” through their drawings/paintings. The sound palette produced by interactive movements of the pencil is predominantly aggressive, involving grating or holing tones; it corresponds with the rough traces that remind of the gestural and e/motional power of action painting.

Towards a digital synaesthetics: The hypermodal configuration of digital abstraction The tracing of digital visual abstraction in the selected electronic artworks has revealed the redefinition of media as multisensory organs and embodiments of perception. This affirms not only McLuhan’s definition of media as prosthetic body extensions, 30 but also Hans Belting’s image27

Kim cit. in Koh, “Illuminating the Brilliance of Life,” 2010, n.p. For a demonstration of Sound Drawing, see the video under http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJLTNhkVTs, accessed September 23, 2013. 29 Statement by Kim Kichul on Sound Looking. http://www.integr8dmedia.net/documents/kim_statement.pdf. 30 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1964). 28

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anthropological concept of the double-medium, 31 which emphasizes the intense exchange relation between body perception and media perception. In the process of human-machine interaction, as induced by the interactive program of the digital artwork, the abstract and calculating media-machine is humanized through sensory perception, empathy, and embodiment. The body in e/motion becomes the contact sheet for artistic creation. Touch, the most basic sense, gives immediate impulses for executing crossmodal transductions. The digital scribing of the body, be it the full body in motion or only the gestural movement of the hand, leads to synchronizing and synesthesizing effects. Through data transcription, the rational abstract power of writing becomes not only visible and traceable, but also tangible. Furthermore, the primordial interactive configuration of the artwork allows for intersensorial as intersubjective experience. It enables one not only to visualize one’s own percepts, but to trace and/or live others’ sensory experiences, to interact with divergent embodiments of perception—as implemented in an exemplary manner in Kim Kichul’s Sound Drawings. The interrelation between abstraction and empathy, already highlighted by Wilhelm Worringer with regard to modern aesthetics,32 is intensified by intersensorial modes of digital interactivity, promoting both proprioception and heteroception. Digital embodiment and digital abstraction are mutually dependent in much the same way as modern abstract art and concrete art are conceptually interrelated. Analog and digital, modern and postmodern visual abstraction, are both deeply rooted in crossmodal relations. But whereas crossmodality in modern abstraction theory and art practice remains attached to the notion of “correspondences,” that is analogies between differential sensory perceptions, crossmodality in digital abstraction mounts to hypermodal “configurations,” thus superseding the analogy of sense modalities and connected media channels by a digital data synthesis. Digital abstraction means that the artwork itself becomes a digital network of crossmodalities, designed by the artist and operated by the apperceptive (inter)action and response system of the user. This transformation is hypermodal in the sense given to the concept by Lemke. Hypermodality defines “new interactions of word-, image-, and sound-based meanings in hypermedia, that is in semiotic artifacts in which signifiers on different scales of syntagmatic organization are linked in complex networks or webs.”33 It is 31 Hans Belting, Bild–Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (München: Fink, 2001). 32 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (München: Piper, 1908). 33 Lemke, “Travels in Hypermodality,” 300.

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“more than multimodality in just the way that hypertext is more than plain text. It is not simply that we juxtapose image, text, and sound; we design multiple interconnections among them, both potential and explicit.” 34 Although the digital leap from multi- to hypermodality is convincingly explained, Lemke’s concept of hypermodality evinces a certain restriction in that it is too closely modeled after the definition of the hypertext in the semiotic tradition (following Umberto Eco) and that it is still, albeit unwittingly, text-centered. The here discussed intersensorial artworks created through digital technologies of visual abstraction suggest to break up the artificial producer-receiver divide between semiotic channels and sense modalities, as well as fuse the hypermedia approach with neuropsychological crossmodal studies. For this reason, the paper argues for a new art theory of digital abstraction based on the category and concept of hypermodality as a hyperbinding of sense modalities. One final question remains: Where or wherein, then, lies the digital of digital abstraction? It is embedded in the deep algorithmic structures which can surface at any time in many different media formats and modal manifestations; in the electronic “transcoder” signal as a particular pattern of the digital data flux; in the imperceptible map of transductions; in the universal code of data compression. As hidden as digital abstraction operates, it can build configurative maps within a variety of formal systems, elaborate them in various media and sensory conduits, and thus form an interactive network that functions on a perceptual, emotional, intellectual, and symbolic level. The enormous connective and fusional power of digital abstraction, its infinite potential to transduce one sense modality into another could help us as human receivers and users of digital art to refine a capacity given to us by nature: the “vigorous interaction and integration of the senses.”35 Under this perspective, the goal of modern abstract art to promote the interrelation and fusion of our senses by a synthesis of the arts climaxing in the ideal of synesthetic art seems to reflourish in the augmented reality of the digital world.

34

Lemke, “Travels in Hypermodality,” 300. Shinsuke Shimomo and Ladan Shams, “Sensory Modalities Are Not Separate Modalities: Plasticity and Interactions,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 11 (2001): 506. 35

Plate 2.1. František Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors, 1912. Oil on canvas, 211 x 220 cm. National Gallery in Prague.

Plate 2.2. František Kupka, Ballad/Joys, 1901. Oil on wood with wax underpainting, 83.5 x 126.5 cm. National Gallery in Prague.

wton. Study forr Fugue in Tw wo Colors, Plate 2.3. František Kupka, Disks of New 1911–1912. O Oil on canvas, 100.3 1 x 73.7 cm m. Philadelphia M Museum of Artt.

Plate 3.1. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911. Oil on canvas, 190 x 275 cm. Private collection, New York.

Plate 3.2. Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Composition V, 1911. Oil on canvas, 95 x 139 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Inv. no. GE–10077.

Plate 4.1. Ivan Kliun, Rushing Landscape, c. 1915. Oil on canvas, 106 x 87 cm. Private collection, Europe.

Plate 4.2. Ivan Kliun, Spherical Nonobjective Composition, around 1922–1925. Oil on canvas, 101.8 x 70.7 cm. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

Plate 4.3. Ivan Kliun, Study of Color and Form on a Black Wheel, 1931. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

Plate 4.4. Ivan Kliun, On the Problem of Composition: Constructing Images according to Decorative and Organic Principles, 1942. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

4 x 46 cm. Plate 5.1. Joaaquín Torres–Gaarcía, Arte Univversal, 1932. O il on canvas, 54 Private collecction, Paris.

Plate 5.2. Joaquín Torres–García, Infinite Construction, 1942. Oil on canvas, 52 x 36.5 cm. Private collection, Washington, D.C.

Plate 6.1. William Conggdon, Terra ghiacciata veerso primaverra, 1983. 80 x 100 cm. Copyright Thee William G. Co ongdon Foundat ation, Milano.

anco, 1989. 60 x 70 cm. Copy yright The Plate 6.2. Wiilliam Congdonn, Cielo con bia William G. C Congdon Foundaation, Milano.

Plate 6.3. William Congdonn, Impronta, 199 90. 90 x 80 cm m. Copyright Th he William G. Congdon F Foundation, Miilano.

Plate 7.1. Gordon Monro, Dissonant Particles, 2004/2005. Still from video. Copyright Gordon Monro, 2004.

Plate 7.2. Jon McCormack, Eden, 2000. Installation photograph. Copyright Jon McCormack, 2000.

Plate 8.1. Golan Levin, Ghost Pole Propagator, 2007. Copyright Golan Levin.

Plate 8.2. Hung Keung, Bloated City/Skinny Language, 2007. Copyright Hung Keung.

Plate 9.1. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Große Chromatik (Great Chromatic), 1954. Oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm. Private Collection.

Plate 9.2. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Stellar in Grau (Stellar in Gray), 1955. Oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm. Private Collection.

Plate 11.1. Kazimir Malevich, Selfportrait, 1933. Oil on canvas, 73 x 66 cm. State Russian Museum Saint Petersburg.

Plate 11.2. Olga Rozanova, Green Stripe, 1917. Oil on canvas, 71.2 x 49 cm. State Museum Preserve Kremin Rostov.

Plate 12.1. E Ernest Mancobba, Untitled, 19 965. Oil on ccanvas, 93.3 x 60.3 cm. Collection: Izziko South Afriican National Gallery, G Cape T Town. Image courtesy c of Galerie Mikhhael Andersen, Copenhagen. C

Plate 12.2. Kevin Atkinson, Aqua–A–Blast, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 198 cm. Collection: Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg.

Plate 12.3. Dan Halter, Fabrication 3, 2012. Archival inkjet prints and woven archival inkjet prints on acid-free paper, 47 x 84 cm. Images courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13.1. Wendy Kelly, Line Upon Line, 2011. Mixed technique on canvas, 167.2 x 213.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13.2. Col Jordan, Mosaic 8–The Gate, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 160 x 280 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 15.1 and 15.2. Katrin Keller, Sweet Dreams of Color, 2010. Oil on canvas, 65 x 65 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

PART TWO THE INTERCULTURALITY OF ABSTRACT ART: BETWEEN CO-OPTATION AND APPROPRIATION

CHAPTER NINE ERNST WILHELM NAY: VOM GESTALTWERT DER FARBE— ARTISTIC CONCEPTS AND CULTURAL POLICY IN POSTWAR GERMANY FRANZISKA MÜLLER

Ernst Wilhelm Nay is known as an abstract artist of the 1950s, particularly for his so-called “Scheibenbilder” (Disc paintings).1 His career as a painter began with his first exhibitions in the 1920s. In 1937, Nay belonged to the artists who were forbidden to show their works in exhibitions. His painting Liebespaar (Lovers, 1930) was derided in the National Socialist newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, other paintings by Nay were shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.2 In Nay’s so-called “Frankreichbilder” (France paintings), which he painted during World War II, the utopian character of his art can already be seen. 3 Although these works developed from the experiences Nay made during the war, they do not refer to this topic directly. Instead, Nay painted allegories of fundamental human experiences, ideals, and virtues, which also anticipated the postwar period. His “Hekate–Bilder” (Hecate paintings) of 1945, focusing on this legendary character, proceeded in this direction.4 Soon after the war came to an end, Nay continued his artistic work, quickly gaining the support of a number of curators. Through Werner Haftmann and others, Nay had access to a wide network of art critics, art historians, and curators. With his “Scheibenbilder,” which he 1 Aurel Scheibler: Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde (Köln: DuMont, 1990), Vol. II, 62–237. 2 “Biografie,” in Aurel Scheibler: Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde (Köln: DuMont, 1990), Vol. I, S. 50. 3 Scheibler: Werkverzeichnis, Vol. I, 198–223. 4 Ibid., 224–293.

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created between 1952 and 1960, he gained an international reputation. In 1955, the book Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe. Fläche, Zahl und Rhythmus (On the Use of Color for Forming: Plane, Number, and Rhythm) was published. 5 The same year, Nay participated in the first Documenta in Kassel. He was also honored with the Lichtwark award of the city of Hamburg in 1955 and with the Grand Art Award of North Rhine– Westphalia in 1956. In the 1950s, Nay’s paintings could repeatedly be seen in various German and European cities and in New York. In 1960, he received the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation award, which demonstrated his growing success. It is astonishing that Nay’s book, which was written at the same time and explains the system that underlies his “Scheibenbilder,” has barely attracted any interest. Around 1960, Nay began to cross out these discs; the so-called “eye-motif” became the constitutive element of his “Augenbilder” (Eye paintings), which evoked controversy when they were shown in the third Documenta exhibition in 1964. The three Documenta– Bilder A, B, and C were shown in an installation conceived by Arnold Bode, curator of the exhibition. Already in 1955 and 1959, Bode and Haftmann were in charge of the exhibition and Nay’s paintings were shown in prominent positions. However, the so-called 1964 “Documenta– Debatte” not only focused on the presentation of the works but also critically examined Nays status as an artist and the rhetoric with which art critics discussed his works. In retrospective, Walter Grasskamp made clear, “the polemic . . . marks the end of the first consolidation of west German art after the war under the banner of ‘abstraction as a world language’.”6 This clarifies that Nay was regarded as a protagonist of this orientation and his reputation seems to have been linked to the cultural policies of postwar Germany. This position is supported by the fact that Nay was awarded a first class Federal Cross of Merit in 1967. However, Peter-Klaus Schuster assessed the “Documenta–Debatte” as a sign for the “abrupt change of the intellectual climate,” in which Nay’s paintings lost their “implicitness.”7 5

Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe. Fläche, Zahl und Rhythmus (München: Prestel, 1955). 6 Walter Grasskamp, “Künstlerbiographien,” in Deutsche Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Malerei und Plastik 1905–1985, eds. Christos M. Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal and Wieland Schmied (München: Prestel, 1986), 489ff. Wordby-word quotations were translated by the author. 7 Peter-Klaus Schuster, “Kunst im Kontext: E. W. Nay’s Ständige Wandlung,” in Ernst Wilhelm Nay. 1902–1968. Bilder und Dokumente, ed. Archiv für Bildende Kunst am Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (München: Prestel, 1980), 13.

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Referring to Nay’s positioning in this context, the state of research is inconsistent. His self-portrayal is characterized by statements of autonomy from artistic, social, and political influences. 8 Most studies about Nay adopt this assessment of Nay as an outsider. However, most overviews of postwar art see him in the context of abstract art and cultural policy. For example, Eckhart Gillen wrote that Nay obtained “the status of a representative of the young democracy” and “campaigned with his festive paintings . . . for Germany’s approval as a peaceful and liberal country.”9 The analysis of Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe shows that Nay’s theoretical work is connected with the aesthetic and philosophical concepts of abstract art in postwar Germany. The text contains references to topics which were omnipresent in the artistic and cultural discourses of this era: the idea of abstract art as a world language; abstract art as the only possible way to do art; the focus on plane, form, and color; the motif of “Stunde Null” (Zero hour)—claiming a completely new beginning and even a new worldview, which was able to integrate space and time, and its transfer into art. However, in terms of reception, the book was largely ignored. Even Haftmann’s 1960 monograph on Nay almost entirely disregards the publication, only mentioning it briefly. 10 Another monograph by Fritz Usinger refers to Nay’s theoretical work in a more direct way. Usinger maintains that art theory and art are inseparably connected in great works of art. Together, they constitute a medium with which to comprehend the intellectual situation and conceive appropriate possibilities of creation. Referring to Nay’s pictures, Usinger argues that they are based on a relatively systematic theory. Thus, according to Usinger, it is not surprising that Nay dedicated a whole book—Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe—to this theory. 11 Usinger, though, did not elaborate further on Nay’s notes and writings; instead, he used Nay’s formulations to explain the artist’s works. Similarly, other studies on Nay that consider his theoretical writings only consult his notations to interpret his artworks without further studying the texts themselves. Only Peter-Klaus Schuster has pointed out the significance of Nay’s writings for art theory of the twentieth century. He states that “a tendency of art belongs to the 8

Magdalene Claesges, ed., E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968 (Köln: DuMont, 2002). 9 Eckhart Gillen, Feindliche Brüder? Der Kalte Krieg und die Deutsche Kunst 1945–1990 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2009), 120. 10 Werner Haftmann, E. W. Nay (2nd ed. Köln: DuMont, 1991), 197. 11 Fritz Usinger, Ernst Wilhelm Nay (Recklinghausen: Aurel Bongers, 1961), 9f.

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intellectual climate of an era” 12 and concludes “Nay’s written estate . . . may count as a document of unique standing for the continuity and the continuous demands of modernity in Germany;” Nay has “responded to the contemporary intellectual development.”13 Thus, Nay’s estate can be read as a journal “of the hopes and demands of this era.”14 Just as well, Hermann Maué writes that Nay’s notations “reflect the spirit of the age.” 15 However, there is no examination of the sources that accompany this assessment. A first substantial study of Nay’s theoretical work was published in 2001. In her dissertation, Magdalene Claesges discusses Nay’s writings and publications extensively and within the context of his lifelong intellectual pursuit. Thus, the analysis of Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe remained within the context of Nay’s intellectual and theoretical development; the contextualization of his motifs and discussion of his works within the historical situation remained unaccounted for.16 For Nay, intellectual reflection upon artistic action was important; theoretical reflections exist for all stages of his œuvre. These were not intended for publication in the first place—rather they served for clarification and artistic self-discovery.17 According to Nay, theory had to be developed further in order for art to be current. Although Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe also included earlier thoughts that Nay had developed in the 1930s, the book was published in postwar Germany in the mid-1950s. Around 1950, Nay’s systematic use of color became visible in his socalled “Rhythmische Bilder” (Rhythmic paintings) and “Fugale Bilder” 12

Schuster, “Kunst im Kontext,” 7. Ibid., 8. 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Hermann Maué, “Dokumentation zu Leben und Werk,” in Ernst Wilhelm Nay. 1902–1968. Bilder und Dokumente, ed. Archiv für Bildende Kunst am Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (München: Prestel, 1980), 50. 16 Magdalene Claesges–Bette, Die Geburt des elementaren Bildes aus dem Geist der Abstraktion. Versuch einer Deutung der theoretischen Schriften von Ernst Wilhelm Nay (Ph.D. diss., University Köln, 2001). 17 Elisabeth Nay–Scheibler and Magdalene Claesges, conversation with the author on March 3, 2011. See also Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Regesten zu Leben und Werk” (Manuscript November/December 1958.), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 53–55; Elisabeth Nay–Scheibler, introduction to Magdalene Claesges, ed., E.W. Nay– Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968 (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 6f.; Maué, “Dokumentation,” 49. 13

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(Fugal paintings), wich became more methodical. It seems that Nay tried to counterbalance the loss of concreteness with a more intellectual approach to painting. 18 In 1952, he published an article called “Die Gestaltfarbe.”19 Another early indication of Nay’s intentional work on the book is a first preface, which he wrote in August 1953.20 In October and November of the same year, he taught a course at the Hamburg School of Arts, which forced him to develop his thoughts more systematically.21 The concluding lecture, titled “Gestaltwert der Farbe,” already contained important parts of the book. The final publication of Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe marks the moment when Nay’s reflections and his artistic action condense into a general concept, which he called his “first system.”22 This gives the “Scheibenbilder” not only their well-balanced impact, which most paintings of the 1950s show, but also a certain steadiness in the sense that it was the most constant phase in Nay’s œuvre. However, he did not regard his theory as universally valid. According to him, there is not something like a general system, but only individual solutions; this also applies to his own artistic work.23 Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe cannot be interpreted easily and is partially contradictory, but nevertheless it contains a compact theoretical system. 18

Claesges–Bette, Geburt des elementaren Bildes, 112. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Die Gestaltfarbe” (originally published in Das Kunstwerk 1952/2,4), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 64f. 20 Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Über die arithmetische Methode. Manuscript of the preface to Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe” (Manuscript August 14, 1953), in E.W. Nay– Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 75–76. 21 Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Gestaltwert der Farbe” (Lecture given at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg, November 27, 1953, originally published in Gustav Hassenpflug, ed., Abstrakte Maler Lehren. Ein Beitrag zur Abstrakten Formenund Farbenlehre als Grundlage der Malerei, München, Hamburg: Heinrich Ellermann, 1959), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931– 1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 80–90. 22 Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “From a letter to Günther Franke” (Letter dated March 3, 1956), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 134. 23 Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “From a letter to Werner Haftmann” (Letter dated April 8, 1961), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 200; Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Auf der Insel Kreta entstandene Niederschrift” (dated June 1965), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 261f.; Maué, “Dokumentation,” 49f. 19

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Nay describes it in quite an abstract way. Additionally, his writing style is neither clear nor linguistically correct. There are jumps from one idea to another, overlaps, and repetitions. Nay also uses terms from musical theory such as “tone-motion” and “counterpoint,” which he does not always explain. By using the difficult aphoristic style, Nay wanted to avoid description in order to keep the reader in the field of visual production and also limit the circle of readers.24 The book consists of an introduction and thirteen chapters; the first and second chapters, called “Die Fläche” (The plane) and “Chromatik. Über die Übereinstimmung von Farbe und Fläche” (Chromatic: on the correspondence of color and plane), are much longer than the other chapters. They clarify that plane and color are the most important elements of a painting. While plane is the reference point of all means of creation, color is the most significant element that organizes the plane.25 All means are related to the plane, from which the conception of a picture can be understood. 26 Through the organization of colors, the plane becomes a “shaped plane,” which integrates the three dimensions plus time.27 In this sense, Nay designates color as Gestaltfarbe. The following chapters expound the use of color to create motion, rhythm, relations, and tension. As the text shows, Nay’s art is based on form. To create a picture, he uses “genuine” means of creation as well as “means of intellectual conception,” the former including the main elements plane and color, arithmetic organization, number, and rhythm.28 For every picture, the colors form a unique “chromatic sequence,” which is changeable. By these “chromatic relations” the plane can be perceived as spatial depth. 29 For example, in the painting Große Chromatik (Great Chromatic, 1954; Plate 9.1), Nay uses yellow, red, white, and beige circles of different sizes, violet ovals, and blue forms. Particularly the yellow circles seem to be in the foreground because of their brightness and their size, while the darker and smaller red circles seem to be further away. The other color-forms give the impression that they were located at different distances. In the painting Feuerspiel 24

Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “From a letter to Bernhard Sprengel” (Letter dated December 22, 1955), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931– 1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 129. 25 Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 7–16. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 Ibid., 11, 18. 28 Ibid., 9f., 25. 29 Ibid., 13–16.

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(Fireplay, 1956), Nay arranges red, orange, light blue, dark blue, and yellow circles, all nearly similar in size, so that they seem to be on the same plane. By means of smaller circles in the same color, which seem to reach further back, Nay creates depth. Furthermore, Nay writes that the sizes of the color planes form the beats of rhythm. Thus they integrate motion into a static form of representation, thereby integrating time into the pictures. 30 The color circles give the impression of movement, as visible in Große Chromatik (Great Chromatic) and Satztechnik I (1955). Motion becomes much more obvious in Takte (Beats, 1954), which shows rows of black, orange, and small yellow boxes, giving the impression of a rhythmical movement. This also applies to Spiritual (1953), in which rows of black and white dots seem to move both vertically and horizontally. According to Nay, all means of creation relate to one another, a symbol and reference point for these relations is the number.31 Furthermore, the color planes are organized in a contrapuntal composition, which means with overlaps, different proportions, and an inversion of relations.32 Such a composition is evident, for example, in Mit fünf weißen Sternen (With Five White Stars, 1955): Nay arranged large black circles, normally suggesting depth, with smaller white circles. Here, the sizes of the circles are contradictory to their choice of color. Such an inversion is also given in Stellar in Grau (Stellar in Gray, 1955; Plate 9.2), in which darker and smaller black and dark gray circles overlap larger white, light gray, and light blue circles. In Nachtbild (Night Picture, 1957), Nay uses black circles of different sizes, which overlap brown, gray, yellow, and white circles. Dissonance is another means of creation that Nay uses. In Zinngrau und Ocker (Tin-gray and Ochre, 1956), a light blue circle at the top left and a blue form at the bottom violate the homogeneous dark composition of ochre, gray, brown, and black. The same goes for Gelb chromatisch (Yellow Chromatic, 1958), in which three smaller green forms stand in contrast to the composition of yellow, orange, and red forms. Nay often uses green dots and forms, as in Stellar in Grau (Stellar in Gray) and Vom fernen Grau (About Far Gray, 1955). As Nay writes, these dissonances were intended to stress the tensions that appear in the painting and therefore make visible the relations of the means used.33

30

Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 17f. Ibid., 20, 23. 32 Ibid., 21f. 33 Ibid., 22. 31

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According to Nay, this interdependence of all elements ensures a meaning of the painting that goes beyond the visual.34 In the beginning of the book, he clarifies that art plays an important role for a newly designed world.35 The last four chapters, titled “Human” (Humane), “Das Geistige” (The Spiritual), “Kontakt” (Contact), and “Wahrheit” (Truth), also refer to the meaning of art for humanity; they can be summarized as the “means of intellectual conception” mentioned above. 36 At the same time, Nay stresses, however, that neither art nor its means imply meaning; generate sensation, feeling, invocation, or illusions; or can be understood in a symbolic, associative, or psychological way; they only serve creation.37 Even in the chapter “Human” (Humane), Nay points out that painting is not humane and human meaning is not the artist’s concern.38 According to him, the picture is a medium for constituting space, which embodies the human idea of space in a direct way in its creation.39 Nay looked at the world in its spatial condition and derived the human worldview from his undefined experience of space. Thus, art is supposed to counter the situation of humanity, which had lost its orientation. This goes back to Nay’s “Tabula–rasa aesthetics,” which originated in his understanding of a loss of reality and space40: Humanity has come to realize that space can no longer be imagined or understood by traditional methods of perception and representation; it can neither be shown in a perspective nor in an illusionist way.41 Already in papers of 1946 and 1949, Nay interpreted his pictures as a reaction to the “crisis of the modern worldview,” a consequence of a “loss of world, reality, and space” 42 because there exist no “concrete realities and no perspective worldview,” 43 for the artist, only plane and color are left. According to Nay, the artist has to invent a new design for space to fulfill the demands of this new experience. An appropriate design was the “a–perspective” worldview, which contains the three dimensions plus time. It stands for the possibility to make the new experience of space

34

Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 10, 20. Ibid., 7–9. 36 Ibid., 25f. 37 Ibid., 7, 9, 13, 15, 19, 24. 38 Ibid., 25. 39 Ibid., 7–9, 11f. 40 Schuster, “Kunst im Kontext,” 10–11. 41 Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 7–9, 12. 42 Schuster, “Kunst im Kontext,” 10. 43 Ibid. 35

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visible through the order of color. Thus, art visualizes a new worldview and allows orientation.44 This search for orientation was not only topographical, but also ideological. It goes back to the sentiment of the 1940s: Postwar Germany was characterized by a re-orientation and a search for both national and individual identity. After the collapse of National Socialist culture, a lack of cultural values remained. This crisis of identity was intensified by the fact that no German state existed; the occupying powers took over governmental responsibilities; even the choice of the form of government fell into the hands of strangers. This loss of self-conception led to sustained uncertainty and the need for self-assurance.45 Referring to Nay, Schuster embraced the need for a fundamental re-definition by using the term “Geworfenheit”46 (“thrownness”) following existentialist tendencies, which were one of the most important influences of the 1950s. Similar formulations can be found in Haftmann’s speeches that characterized the present as “a time of total political confusion and formlessness” 47 and Germany as “mental no-man’s-land,”48 whose “inner formlessness had an apocalyptic extend.”49 Therefore, the loss of orientation also refers to the loss of ideals and the loss of social and moral values. Nay described this situation as a loss of the formerly reliable worldview structuring social life: “Idealism, . . . heroism, Christianity, humanism, law—one has to realize that the validity of all of these ideas expired.” 50 Just as spatial orientation got lost, all civilizing guidelines did so as well. Thus, it was necessary to provide a new worldview, which also meant defining a new 44

Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 7–9, 11f.; Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “Ansprache aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Lichtwark–Preises der Stadt Hamburg” (Speech held on the occasion of the Lichtwark–Award, Hamburg, March 26, 1955), in E.W. Nay– Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 117. 45 Peter Bender, Deutschlands Wiederkehr. Eine ungeteilte Nachkriegsgeschichte 1945–1990 (2nd ed. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008), 11f.; Werner Faulstich, introduction to Werner Faulstich, ed., Die Kultur der fünfziger Jahre (München: Fink, 2007), 8. 46 Schuster, “Kunst im Kontext,” 10. 47 Werner Haftmann, “Der Partisan Brutus” (Manuscript 1947), in Skizzenbuch zur Kultur der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Werner Haftmann (München, Prestel, 1960), 20. 48 Werner Haftmann, epilogue to Werner Haftmann, ed., Skizzenbuch zur Kultur der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze (München: Prestel, 1960), 295. 49 Ibid., 293. 50 Nay, “Regesten,” 180.

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idea of humanity. Nay called this an interplay between humanity and worldview because “man is disposed to establish a relation to space and to act appropriate to it.”51 In this sense, Haftmann called modern painting “an expression of a radical change in the existential reference frame and in the reality of man.”52 This is why art must be understood as an instrument to visualize the new forms of an era. The idea of art as an instrument of cognition and orientation was not new, but a cultural tradition that testifies the human need for a worldview. Pictures are to “give structures and images, which allow communication and orientation,” as Eibl–Eibesfeld writes. 53 One of the most important theories of art as an instrument of cognition was developed by Konrad Fiedler at the end of the nineteenth century; Wilhelm Worringer also discusses the function of art to reflect the external world. 54 Both made clear that imitation of nature was not necessary,55 and Nay did so as well. Instead, the artist had to focus only on formal creation. The artist had to follow a method bound to his own invention, his visual intelligence. The viewer had to understand this method, and, in this way, he recognized the rules and structures in which the world is organized and conceptually perceivable.56

51

Nay, “Lichtwark–Preis,” 115. Werner Haftmann, “Die moderne Malerei als Ausdruck eines gewandelten Weltund Selbstverständnisses des Menschen” (originally published in Menschliche Existenz und moderne Welt, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), in Werner Haftmann. Der Mensch und seine Bilder. Aufsätze und Reden zur Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karl Gutbrod (Köln: DuMont, 1980), 10. 53 Irenäus Eibl–Eibesfeld and Christa Sütterlin, Weltsprache Kunst. Zur Natur- und Kunstgeschichte bildlicher Kommunikation (2nd ed. Wien: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2008), 27. 54 Konrad Fiedler, “Über die Beurteilung von Werken der bildenden Kunst” (originally published Leipzig: Hirzel, 1876), in Konrad Fiedler. Schriften über Kunst, ed. Hans Eckstein (Köln: DuMont, 1996), 33; Konrad Fiedler, “Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische Wahrheit” (originally published in Wissenschaftliche Beilage der Leipziger Zeitung, 1881), in Konrad Fiedler. Schriften über Kunst, ed. Hans Eckstein (Köln: DuMont, 1996), 109; Wilhelm Worringer, “Die Probleme der Gegenwartskunst,” in bildende Kunst 10/1948, 30; Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (originally published Ph.D. diss., University of Bern, 1907; München: Fink, 2007), 77–82. 55 Fiedler, “Beurteilung,” 33f.; Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 71. 56 Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 7f., 11, 25f. 52

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Figure 9.1. R Richard Hamiltton, Just what makes today’ss homes so diffferent, so appealing?, 11956. Collage, 26 2 x 25 cm, Ku unsthalle Tübinggen, Sammlung g Zundel.

Figure 9.2. R Ruhr–Festspielee Recklinghauseen. Exhibition titled Mensch und Form unserer Zeit ((Man and form in our times), Kunsthalle K Reckklinghausen, 19 952.

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The creation of painting must be imagined as an application of external structures, principles of order, constellations, and processes. This can be visual impressions but also acoustic rhythms or scientific structures. Another example of this approach to painting is the circle, which dominates Nay’s pictures. It is not only a symbol of the cosmos and the cycle of life, but also an instrument to structure displays of the world, including maps, globes, and the path of the planets. Nay was certain that understanding paintings makes the world more concrete to the viewer. The experience of space prevalent at that time consists of several impressions. First, there was the experience of an incomprehensible, endless space and the “world as a whole”: Technical developments like high-performance telescopes and space flight made the earth visible as a globe and caused the impression of endlessness and a “whole world” (das “Weltganze”), which Nay described in Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe.57 The first photographs of the earth were made by an American V2–rocket in 1946 and, in 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 provided a view of the globe.58 The presence of this topic in the 1950s can be seen in Richard Hamiltons collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956; Fig. 9.1), which shows a cut-out of the globe at the top.59 Air travel enabled people to gain this “global” experience; Nay was an enthusiastic airplane traveler. Nay believed that the new worldview would be like the one that science, physics, and technology discovered at the time. 60 Art and technology were brought together in a far more accessible way as well: the exhibition Mensch und Form Unserer Zeit (Man and Form of Our Time, Recklinghausen 1952) presented a sculpture by Henry Moore near a washing machine, a painting by Willi Baumeister together with a food processor, and an isolator in order to convince the audience about the formal unity and how topical modern art was. (Fig. 9.2) A more explicit political reference was provided by the geopolitical situation: two wars, which affected the whole world, the Cold War, and the global threat of nuclear weapons had a significant impact on the impression of the “world as a whole.” This aspect of geopolitics became most emphatic 57

Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 26, see also 9, 23. Christoph Asendorf, Super Constellation—Flugzeug und Raumrevolution. Die Wirkung der Luftfahrt auf Kunst und Kultur der Moderne (Wien, New York: Springer, 1997), 311f. 59 Christoph Asendorf, Entgrenzung und Allgegenwart. Die Moderne und das Problem der Distanz (München: Fink, 2005), 117f. 60 Ernst Wilhelm Nay, “From a letter to Adolf Arndt” (Letter dated April 28, 1963), in E.W. Nay–Lesebuch: Selbstzeugnisse und Schriften 1931–1968, ed. Magdalene Claesges (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 237. 58

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in the term “one world,” which goes back to Wendell Willkie’s book of the same title. These tendencies can be described more objectively as “German integration into the West,” “Europeanization,” and “Americanization” (the latter was discussed controversially at the time). These ideas did not only come with economical implications, but were aimed at unity beyond national borders. After 1945, the cosmopolitan idea helped to overcome nationalism and gained currency as a “multi-national and multicultural unity of action, it became the vanishing point of a positive utopia.”61 In his essay “Modern Culture and its ‘Political Idea’” (1957), Haftmann describes the development of art against this background. He explains that modern art realizes “supranational orders,” unifying the “technical, scientific, and social developments” of our “entire contemporary way of life” to form an “intellectual model.”62 In another essay of the same year, titled “Unity and Variety of the European Arts,” Haftmann declares for European culture a “will to a world culture,” which art represents on a global scale, namely the “global rank of the modern European way of forming and expressing.”63 His argumentation carries the motif of “abstract art as a world language,” which can be understood as a transfer of the “one world idea” into cultural policy. Thus, the idea of global unity was most clearly proclaimed. Haftmann and other art critics proclaimed “abstract art as a world language” that would allow global communication and assure peace. Up to the 1960s, there were multiple efforts to re-establish international relations, which were supposed to “represent international trends.”64 Exhibitions of German abstract art took place in Germany and

61

Arnold Sywottek, “Wege in die 50er Jahre,” in Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre, eds. Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek and the Forschungsinstitut der Friedrich–Ebert–Stiftung (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1993), 28. 62 Werner Haftmann, “Moderne Kultur und ihre ‘politische Idee’” (Speech held at the Congress of the Fontation Européenne de la Culture, Amsterdam 1957. Originally published in Jahresring 57/58, 1957), in Skizzenbuch zur Kultur der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Werner Haftmann (München: Prestel, 1960), 73. 63 Werner Haftmann, “Einheit und Vielfalt der europäischen Künste” (Speech held at the ‘Congress of the Fontation Européenne de la Culture,’ Amsterdam 1957), in Skizzenbuch zur Kultur der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Werner Haftmann (München: Prestel, 1960), 82f. 64 Sabine Eckmann, “Brüche und Kontinuitäten. Moderne deutsche Kunst zwischen ‘Drittem Reich’ und Kaltem Krieg,” in Kunst und Kalter Krieg.

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abroad and particularly works by French and American artists were shown in German cities, the most important presentations being the Documentas. Nay also increasingly focused on exhibiting his works abroad. This was not only a result of cultural policy, but also refers to the common trend of internationalization of the art world and art market. The idea of art as a language was also reflected in Nay’s artistic theory. In Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, he writes that the artist has to bring up a new way of creation in order to be able to develop new, unburdened, and credible means of communication. The viewer could understand them if he understood the method that underlay the works. In the chapter “Kontakt” (Contact), Nay assures that his works serve to make contact as providing for a real and unconditional connection between people. Thus, works of art “add a grain of love to the ‘whole world’.”65 Closely linked to the formulation of a new worldview was a new idea of humanity. According to Nay, for the people to be aware of the world they live in, a relationship between humanity and a wholesome worldview needs to be restored or newly developed. With the help of art, humans could grasp the changed world, find their way around, understand themselves, and act appropriately.66 Looking back at the description of the world as endless and global and the efforts to establish a world language, the appropriate concept of humanity must be “cosmopolitan” or that of “world citizens.” 67 The search for identity mentioned above is a consequent turning away from past identifications. This worldview was defined by opposites: democracy and freedom instead of dictatorship; cosmopolitanism instead of nationalism; world art instead of national art; abstraction instead of realism. But how did the art world behave towards the political world? Art served as a projection screen of social, political, and cultural processes and as a medium of orientation and changes in values. This led to an increasing number of publications and speeches in which the authors communicated these social duties of art as well as their aesthetic concepts. The question remains how the correspondences between Nay’s concept and the concerns of cultural policy can be explained. Nay’s description of himself as nonpolitical and independent from all political influences can Deutsche Positionen 1945–89, eds. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Köln: DuMont, 2009), 50f. 65 Nay, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe, 11, 26; Nay writes “Weltganze” in the sense of the “world as a whole.” 66 Ibid., 7–9; Nay, “Lichtwark–Preis,” 114f. 67 Nay, “Regesten,” 180, 183.

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be seen as a result of his search for orientation in this matter. Besides striving for autonomy, Nay’s apolitical positioning may also come from the certainty that all moral and idealistic clues got lost. The fact that Nay agreed with the re-definition of worldview and the idea of humanity is a result of his search for orientation. This had already started in the 1930s: As Claesges points out, “for a young artist, who was still searching for his way, it was not easy to orient himself in an environment, which was characterized by increasingly more difficult political circumstances, in which art movements that had been a guiding force in the past, came to an end.”68 Thus, Nay had to develop his own artistic position in relation to social and historical processes. After the end of the war, this double search for orientation correlated with general efforts to establish new values and an appropriate worldview. The impressions of the world, which he had to understand and in which he had to position himself, were subsequently reflected in his artistic concept. This does not mean an active political positioning or interference of the artist; Nay did not deal with the present in the sense of political action or cultural policy. However, elements of the culture of the 1940s and 1950s, to which he belonged, such as existentialist philosophy, technical and scientific achievements, and social questions, found their way into his artistic concept. To this effect, Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe is a condensation of human and artistic experiences during the postwar era and a demonstration of their realization in works of art. Perhaps this is the best way to describe the parallels between Nay’s concept of art, his worldview, and his idea of humanity in relation to the concerns of this time. This also explains why he became a suitable protagonist of cultural policy: the cultural, philosophical, political, and aesthetic discussions were reflected in the attitudes of the artists and defined to what extent they were regarded as protagonists of their time. In the beginning, I speculated why Nay’s book was largely ignored. One reason could be Nay’s writing style: his texts cannot be easily understood. Furthermore, there seems to have been no explicit reasons to study Nay’s theoretical work in detail for a long time. Regarding the postwar era and contemporary art, enough information, publications, sources, and documents were available: thus there was no reason to further investigate one of the most complex sources. This also applies to research on Nay’s paintings, for which his theoretical writings only were used to describe the compositions. In this sense, Nay’s artistic work could be made accessible from a contemporary perspective to which his writing was not necessarily informative. Another reason could be that Nay did not 68

Claesges–Bette, Geburt des elementaren Bildes, 15.

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have such a key position as, for example, Kandinsky, who was considered to be the “founder” of abstract art and his theoretical work was investigated extensively; the artistic work of the painters of the 1950s seemed to be rather ostensive. Another reason could be that Nay— compared to artists like Kandinsky, Itten, or Baumeister, who were recognized as theoreticians—never held a chair at a university, but only taught a “Lehrkurs” at the Hamburg School of Arts (although, the course’s influence on the book certainly should not be underestimated). Nay’s art theory is a significant example of the aesthetic and philosophical concepts of abstract art in postwar Germany. The book has to be perceived in relation to the political situation of the time, which was characterized by evident and covered forms of co-optation. In this political context, an artist cannot be imagined to take a firmly nonpolitical stance. The correspondences between Nay’s theory and the concepts of his time are a result of his struggle in assuming and defending a nonpolitical position. Both texts and works of art carry ideas, questions, considerations, hopes, and fears of the time in which they were created. Moreover, they document the role of art and that of the artist in relation to postwar politics. This can be seen in Nay’s self-description: When he describes himself as an independent artist, unaffected by any social or political influences, he agrees with the concept of the independent abstract artist. This autonomy was to enable art to be exceptionally credible and deliver moral judgments. Most abstract artists and art critics proclaimed such an independent position—only art that is without function would be able to demonstrate freedom. This ambivalence between autonomy and cooptation also shaped the claim of the leadership of artists: They gained reputation as intellectuals, and art was regarded as an innocent moral instance and exemplary power. To what degree artists were integrated into the formulation of cultural identity becomes evident when one looks at events such as the “Darmstadt talks,” to which artists, art critics, and art historians were invited as speakers. In these Zeitgeist debates, the “Idea of man in our time,” for example, was discussed in a sphere outside of society and independent of current political debates. This is not ideology, as Gerda Breuer pointed out, but self-conception, which gained specific relevance in this historical situation. However, if the sphere of art is considered as a shelter, removed from political reality, it is not possible to characterize the formulated demands, hopes, and aims as primarily political.69 69

Gerda Breuer, introduction to Gerda Breuer, ed., Die Zähmung der Avantgarde. Zur Rezeption der Moderne in den 50er Jahren (Basel, Frankfurt/M.: Stroemfeld, 1997), 15.

CHAPTER TEN FREE ART IN FREE BERLIN: GERMAN-AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR BERLIN ART IN THE 1950S DOROTHEA SCHÖNE

It is true that the most significant and most forceful talents which we have today are in the abstract camp. This kind of painting has a long tradition in Germany.1

Art historical research has, for the most part, agreed upon the interpretation that abstract art was the prevailing style in postwar West German art, 2 dominant—at least in the late 1940s—not necessarily by numbers of artworks made or artists working in abstract styles but rather by its presentation in art debates and discourses, in exhibition reviews, and rankings of importance for the development of modern art. Despite its rejection by a wider public, prominent art critics and art historians such as Werner Haftmann, Will Grohmann, and Franz Roh presented abstract art as the most forceful, future-oriented, democratic, and international style existing at the time; their interpretation of abstract art had multiple facets and served various interests. First, it emphasized that postwar abstract art had its origin in prewar modernism represented by artists such as Wassily 1

Werner Haftmann, “Abstract Painting,” in Documents: Revue du Dialogue Franco-Allemand, Special Issue: German Contemporary Art, ed. Gesellschaft für Übernationale Zusammenarbeit (Offenburg/Baden: Dokumente–Verlag, 1952), 71–80. 2 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The Cia and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Christian J. Meier, Dichotomie Figuration Versus Abstraktion in der Deutschen Kunst von 1945 bis 1985 (Berlin: Epubli, 2012).

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Kandinsky or Paul Klee. By arguing in such a way, critics implied that before the Nazi dictatorship, Germany had a free, democratic art scene, which was now—after 1945—revived and rehabilitated. When Haftmann, in his 1952 quote (cited above), pointed to a long tradition, he naturally thought of Kandinsky as one of the founders of abstract art in Germany. But pointing to prewar modernism and linking it directly to new, postwar art, Haftmann was also eliminating twelve years of Nazi dictatorship and cultural propaganda from art historical narratives and cultural discourses. Furthermore, his writings served the interest of rehabilitating those artists, whom the National Socialists defamed as degenerate—namely those who worked in modernist, expressionist, and nonobjective styles. Rehabilitation was certainly a key interest of the art historical discourses after 1945. Yet, this also fit, in multiple ways, into the political agenda of the Western Allied Forces in the late 1940s and early 1950s, promoting abstract art as a model contrary to the propaganda of figurative art in the East as well as a progressive international style, a “world language” of art, as art critic Werner Haftmann put it in his 1954 publication Die Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts. 3 With little to no pictorial reference to a political agenda, abstract art came with no overtly visible ideological preloading. Rather, it was interpreted as an individual expression of the artist, thus a free and democratic form of expression. The strong pronunciation of freedom and democracy in the context of abstract art naturally bore a political agenda—countering both the National Socialist propaganda as well as the current Socialist and Stalinist politics. Given the strong political contextualization of abstract art in postwar Germany, it comes as no surprise that it was promoted against all tastes and favors of the German public. As late as 1955, a questionnaire still revealed that only six out of one hundred Germans liked modern painting in a “Picasso style,” while thirty-two fully rejected it. Over fifty percent of the people asked had no interest in the question at all.4 Despite the negative reception of abstract art by the German public, abstract art was heavily promoted by the American Occupational Forces, which saw it as both a powerful tool in the cultural competition with the 3

“Zur Annahme dieser Einsicht zwingt die geschichtlich noch nie dagewesene Tatsache, daß der europäische Lebensentwurf, den wir im letzten halben Jahrhundert entwickelt haben und dessen ästhetischer Ausdruck die moderne Kunst und Architektur ist, heute Geltung um den Erdkreis herum erlangt hat.” Werner Haftmann, Die Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel, 1954), 479. 4 Paul Maenz, Die 50er Jahre. Formen eines Jahrzehnts (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1978), 93.

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Soviet Union, its Cold War enemy, as well as a significant medium of reeducating the German public to a more open-minded, avant-gardefriendly, and internationally oriented viewer. Naturally, in such a politically charged discourse, the city of Berlin played a major role. When in 1950, the US High Commissioner (HICOG), in collaboration with the Berlin-based group Prolog (its members consisted of American and German artists and art lovers), as well as the Washington-based American Federation of Art (AFA), organized a touring exhibition of contemporary Berlin art, it naturally meant to convey a political message.5 In the spring of 1950, the AFA prepared an exhibition of contemporary Berlin art to first be shown in three German cities and then tour through fifteen cities in the United States. The Federation’s idea for this exhibition had been initiated by Prolog, which had been promoting the local art scene through publications, lectures, and exhibitions in the private mansions of their American members since 1946. In the summer of 1950, shortly after HICOG and AFA had agreed to tour the exhibition, Charlotte Weidler was hired as a curatorial advisor to the show. Weidler, a German-American curator, had been the advisor on German art for the Carnegie’s International Exhibitions from the 1920s until the late 1930s. Due to this experience, she had established close ties with a number of leading artists and was well informed about their practices even after she had emigrated to the United States in 1939. When in 1950, the Carnegie Institute decided to revive its International Exhibitions, she was hired again as a consultant for the German section. When approaching the HICOG for traveling permission and visa for her research, the governmental institution asked her to also assist on the AFA project. Weidler agreed and took on the task, which Prolog had initiated. While the initial concept of the show, assembled by the Prolog members, included all kinds of artistic styles, Weidler now changed the concept profoundly by putting a much stronger emphasis on the Bauhaus—an institution, in which she had been trained as a young woman—and abstract art. Weidler selected about fifty-five works by twenty–four artists, including prominent names such as Karl Hofer, Max Kaus, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt–Rottluff—all of whom she had included in the Pittsburgh International Exhibitions taking place until

5

See Dorothea Schöne, Freie Künstler in einer freien Stadt. Die amerikanische Förderung der Berliner Nachkriegsmoderne (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016).

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1939. Furthermore, she added younger artists such as Alexander Camaro, Karl Hartung, Bernhard Heiliger, Hans Jaenisch, and Heinz Trökes.6 While names such as Karl Hofer, Max Kaus, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt–Rottluff represented rather expressionist and figurative painting, the publicity material Weidler prepared for the AFA emphasized mainly the abstract tendencies in the show. The press release, for example, made it appear that the majority of the works included were abstract art and that expressionist or surrealist works would have a minor presence as they were discussed rather briefly. Despite all efforts by both Weidler and the AFA representatives, a sponsor and financial support for the exhibition catalog could not be found and consequently, the volume was not published. Therefore, the organizers had to entirely rely on other forms of publicity, mainly press statements and newspaper reviews. For this particular exhibition, press material thus played a major role. Even before the show opened and the official press release was sent to the participating venues, Weidler prepared lists for the AFA, categorizing the artists by style and by how well they were already known in the United States. According to this document, seven were abstract artists, three belonged to the “Bauhaus group,” while fourteen names were listed as “Expressionists.” 7 While these early lists seem somewhat balanced in regard to the styles represented, the press release and what resulted in the tenor of the newspaper reviews reveals that a clear emphasis was put on abstract art. In addition to the list in which she sorted the artists by styles, Weidler also prepared a sheet she entitled—mistakenly or on purpose—as “propaganda notes” (a handwritten correction turned it into “publicity notes”). Here the German–American curator listed those artists and artworks 6

Artists included were: Alexander Camaro, Karl Hartung, Bernhard Heiliger, Werner Heldt, Karl Hofer, Wolf Hoffmann, Willy Robert Huth, Hans Jaenisch, Max Kaus, Karl Heinz Kliemann, Peter Kowalski, Juro Kubicek, Hans Kuhn, Fritz Kuhr, Katja Meirowsky, Max Pechstein, Richard Scheibe, Lou Scheper– Berkenkamp, Renée Sintenis, Hans Thiemann, Heinz Trökes, Hans Uhlmann, and Theodor and Woty Werner. See “List of Artists,” in Cleveland Museum of Art Archives, Collection: Exhibition Compendium, Box 11, Folder: “Contemporary Berlin Artists, 1951.” Karl Schmidt–Rottluff was omitted from the list due to the fact that no adequate work could be found to tour the United States and the artist was not willing to send in anything from his own collection. 7 Letter Charlotte Weidler to Annemarie Pope, February 4, 1951, in: American Federation of Arts Records, 1895–1993, Folder 3. Some names were listed twice in different categories.

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which would sell well to the American audience and art critics: The “abstract painter” Juro Kubicek, who had lived in the United States on a scholarship in 1947, Hans Jaenisch and his semi–abstract painting Airlift, and Bernhard Heiliger’s model of the same topic. All artists she highlighted worked in an “abstract” or “semi–abstract” manner. But to label their works in such terms was simply false. Jaenisch, for example, painted airplanes in clear, geometric shapes and with a rather plain painting surface–but most certainly not in a nonfigurative way. Furthermore, semi–abstract was a term never clarified and somewhat self–contradictory. (Fig. 10.1) To ensure that the American audience would understand the concept of the exhibition and would pay most attention to the favored abstract art, Weidler and the AFA invited a hand–selected group of curators and art critics to view the works while in storage in New York before the actual opening at the first venue in Louisville, Kentucky. Curators such as Alfred H. Barr Jr., James Soby Thrall, Hudson Walker, and the art dealer Curt Valentin came to the storage facility in New York’s harbor to see the artworks first hand, guided by Weidler herself.

Figure 10.1. Hans Jaenisch: Airlift (Luftbrücke (Rosinenbomber)), 1948/1949. Temperarelief, 46 x 140 cm. Copyright Fritz–Winter–Haus.

The strategy paid off—however, not as much as the organizers had hoped. Most press and media representatives showed little to no interest in covering the exhibition. The few journalists who did so followed the interpretation and emphasis Weidler had introduced. The most important review was written by Aline Louchheim for the New York Times. On March 26, 1951, she contextualized the works as anti–Nazi art: Art came to life in West Berlin as soon as the war ended. Those who emerged with the greatest sense of excitement in their regained freedom were the former Bauhaus students, those men whose art was especially abhorrent to the artistic tastes of Herr Hitler. They had literally been

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Of all the works in the exhibition only the abstract works were appreciated by the critics: “In this reviewer’s opinion, neither the young expressionists nor the surrealists were especially noteworthy. . . . ” She points out: Of the abstract artists in this show, Theodor Werner is the most interesting and one can understand why Christian Zervos promoted him in the current issue of Cahiers d’art. Werner’s talent is far–reaching. . . . Werner has assurance as well as facility. His wife, Woty Werner, paints pleasant, Klee–like abstractions on silk which suggest the mystery of Coptic textiles which were their inspiration. . . . The American Federation of Art is doing a real service in assembling and circulating such a show. Hopefully, we will see more work from Germany in the future, including the lively and original abstractions of Fritz Winter. (Fig. 10.2)9

Figure 10.2. Contemporary Berlin Artists (Exhibition View, 1951). Photograph, dimensions unknown. Copyright Cleveland Museum of Art. 8

Aline B. Louchheim, “Post-War German Art Comes to us. Old and New Represented in a Show to Tour this Country,” New York Times, February 25, 1951, 97. 9 Louchheim, “Post-War German Art”.

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While the exhibition toured the United States—a total of fifteen venues in over a year—two articles appeared in the AFA’s own art magazine, which introduced German modern and contemporary art. The first article, “German Art behind the Iron Curtain” by Prolog’s founding member Lehmann–Haupt, appeared in the March issue of the magazine, the other article by Charlotte Weidler titled “Art in Western Germany Today” was published in the April issue. Weidler did not mention her role in assembling the show, but described the exhibition as if she had just been a regular visitor. Her strategy was to present the works in the exhibition as an accurate reflection of postwar German art in general, despite the fact that the show focused solely on Berlin-based artists. While the title led to the assumption that Weidler would address multiple centers of artistic production and key figures of artistic and cultural life in postwar West Germany, about two thirds of the text focused on the artists included in her exhibition. And here again, the emphasis was put above all on the abstract works included in the show. All three articles, Louchheim’s as well as Lehmann–Haupt’s and Weidler’s, also contextualized the artworks with terms such as free and democratic in order to explain to an American audience the uniqueness, strength, and quality of German art, possibly also helping to overcome stereotypes and rejection of anything coming from the former war enemy. Though it was not mentioned directly, this rhetoric most likely also served another purpose: the defense of contemporary American art, which, at that time, was facing harsh attacks and censorship by conservative media and politicians. In defense of American contemporary art, Lehmann–Haupt took up the example of the struggle of German avantgarde artists, their censoring and persecution under the Nazi dictatorship as an argument against the conservative attacks in the United States. On May 17, 1951, Lehmann-Haupt even wrote a personal letter to President Harry S. Truman, asking for more tolerance towards modern art: During a recent trip in Germany, I have sought out some of the modern artists, who survived the Nazi persecution. They continued to paint according to the way they felt they had to paint, under the most dire stress and stain. . . . Mr. President, you would not like the work of these men. But please believe me that they were bitterly earnest about what they did. They were not pursuing a hobby or an arbitrary fad. . . . We are still in a free country and nobody needs to be told what to like and what to not like. You sir, like every citizen, certainly have the right to your own taste. . . . But it is urgently on my heart to ask you to consider the effect of casual, generally disparaging remarks about modern art. Please say as loudly and as often as you care that you don’t like it Mr. President, but please don’t

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With this interpretation and “use” of German art, Lehmann-Haupt was not alone. Other prominent art experts had published articles arguing along the same lines. In 1950, Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, together with the directors of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Whitney Museum in New York, had signed a petition to support the “Freedom for Art,” which was of course reprinted and discussed favorably in the New York Times. In 1952, Barr published in the New York Times one of his most important defending remarks for artistic freedom in the United States—the article “Is Modern Art Communistic?”—also using German art as an example to demonstrate the consequences of censorship.11 There he stated: Modern political leaders, even on our side of the Iron Curtain, feel strongly and express themselves eloquently against modern art. President Truman calls it “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people” and believes “the ability to make things look as they are is the first requisite of an artist.” . . . They couldn’t be more mistaken. . . . The love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictator’s propaganda.

To illustrate his point, he juxtaposed works by Kandinsky with Elk Eber, a painter whose works were prominently displayed in Nazi propaganda shows such as the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) at the Haus der Kunst in Munich shown annually from 1937 to 1941. Both Barr and Lehmann–Haupt belonged to a group of people who used German modern and contemporary art to defend freedom of artistic practice and contemporary American art, thus giving German art yet another layer of political meaning. But labeling German modern art in such political terms and embracing it for political and ideological purposes did not necessarily match up with the artists’ interests back in Germany. In 1951, art historian Bernard Myers began his essay on recent German art in the College Art Journal with the following statement: 10

Letter from Hellmut Lehmann–Haupt to President Harry S. Truman, May 17, 1951 in: Hellmut Lehmann–Haupt Papers, Series 2, Box 7, Folder 5, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 11 Alfred H. Barr Jr, “Is Modern Art Communistic?,” New York Times, December 14, 1952, 22.

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Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the postwar artistic situation in Germany is its complete lack of direct response to the conditions of the time. We may assume that the preponderant interest in various forms of abstraction, chiefly abstract surrealism and abstract expressionism, represents an attempt to escape from the unpleasant realities of a bombed out world.12

Whereas the artists in West Germany and Berlin generally intended to stay away from political and ideology-loaded interpretations, some art critics and curators nevertheless promoted and interpreted their art in such a way. This was possible because of the thematic neutrality of the pictures themselves—unless a title would indicate a certain political meaning, the abstract image itself would not lead to such a conclusion. Furthermore, abstract art was a vague term and loosely applied to numerous forms and styles. Berlin-based artist Heinz Trökes illustrates the multitude of possible inscriptions of names and styles under the umbrella of abstract art in one of his statements. In an article in the East Berlin art magazine Bildende Kunst in 1948, the artist distinguishes between the various forms of abstract art and their respective representatives: nonobjective or “gegenstandslose” art, as Trökes writes, was produced by artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and others, while Picasso and Klee stood for abstract art. Additionally, Ernst, Miró, and Werner contributed to stylistic forms that Trökes called “surrealist, rhythmic” images.13 Although Trökes outlines three different types of abstraction and even names representatives, it remains unclear what exactly abstract art was and what could not be subsumed under this term. Just like the term “modern,” “abstraction” had no clear limits to what would be included and what not. Yet, Trökes acknowledges the fact that abstract art also bore an additional meaning. In a brief statement on abstract art, which he had written a year earlier for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he described the possibilities and meanings of abstract art: Twenty or thirty years ago an advance-guard made the first breach in Germany as well as abroad, now choice troops are following and taking possession. Abstract art opens up new possibilities for mental sensations and experience, and though it does not make the human misery of our time the object and subject of its work, it still is the expression of the powers 12

Bernard Myers, “Postwar Art in Germany,” in College Art Journal Vol. 10, No. 3 (Spring 1951): 251. 13 Heinz Trökes, “Moderne Kunst und Zeitbewusstsein,” in bildende kunst 3 (1948): 17.

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Chapter Ten that to-day try to reorganise, to clarify and to reconstruct and is evidence of the desire for such powers. Abstract art furthermore is a creed, the creed professing faith in individuality, without reference to the Ego, as—in a manner of speaking—world-wide forms are being sought after and are found, symptoms which can be seen everywhere and by everyone. It is also a creed professing faith in freedom, . . . 14

The AFA and Weidler obviously used this ambiguity in their own favor. Disproportional to the actual numbers of abstract artworks included in the exhibition, they strongly emphasized the presence and meaning of abstract art in the show, for example, by categorizing works as “semiabstract.” It is of little surprise that artworks with the most overt political theme would fall into such a category: most prominently Hans Jaenisch’s painting Luftbrücke (Airlift), which celebrated the heroic rescue of West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of the city. Overall, the exhibition received little interest. Of the fifteen venues, only a few were high-ranking museums. Others, which had initially shown interest in the exhibition, canceled on late notice—arguing that the show did not fit their schedule. For example, the Carnegie, Weidler’s chief employer of the previous decades, did not take the exhibition despite the curator’s personal engagement and the AFA’s offer to waive the standard exhibition fee of 175 US dollars. Obviously, the show was not seen as an important contribution to the exhibition calendar. All participating venues were allowed to install the show without any prerequisites from the AFA. Photographs of the installation in Cleveland show that none of the artworks were installed according to style, date of production, or name of artist. In addition, the museum added modernist works from its own collection—for example, Ernst Barlach’s Singing Men (1928) or Dina Kuhn’s Head: Das Wasser (1929) although both Barlach and Kuhn were artists who did not belong to the contemporary art scene in Berlin. Barlach, who died in 1938, had lived most of his life in Northern Germany; Kuhn was a Viennese artist and member of the Wiener Werkstätte. Obviously, neither the AFA nor Weidler were against changing the focus of the exhibition, or adding works from the museum’s own collection. While the AFA failed to secure high-ranking museums to participate and to take over the traveling show of Berlin art, it was nevertheless successful in playing along with the general effort of promoting abstract 14

Unpublished manuscript by Heinz Trökes, 17 March 1947, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (Germany), Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Heinz Trökes Papers, I, B–321.

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art as the most promising and most important stylistic tendency of the time. When, in 1955, the art dealer Martha Jackson presented works by contemporary German artists—among them Heinz Trökes—the press release stated: “Germany’s most forceful and significant talents today are occupied with the abstract.”15 Two years later, the seminal exhibition German Art of the 20th Century opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For two months, the 1957 exhibition showed more than 170 works: paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. The few examples of post-1945 art were sculptures by Hans Hartung, Bernhard Heiliger, and Hans Uhlmann as well as paintings by Willi Baumeister, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Theodor Werner, and Fritz Winter; all of whom worked in abstract or semi-abstract styles.16 On October 6, 1957, a few days after the opening, Howard Devree reviewed the exhibition for the New York Times: Seldom does an exhibition have the triple impact—emotional, psychological, and sheer visual—which is to be found in the showing of German art of the twentieth century which has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art.17

But Devree now solely focused on prewar modernism because it better served the argument of countering totalitarian propaganda and ideology: Dissatisfaction and protest are prevalent and undoubtedly figured more than the aesthetic factors in the condemnation of much of the work by the Nazis when they came to power; for such work and the more abstract could not be turned into the propaganda and the sickly sentiment which the Nazis (and the Russian rulers since) have made official.18

Just like Berlin Contemporary Artists, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition was set out to restore the reputation of German art after the war and to document the visual evidence of a young, democratic spirit, yet with a stronger focus on prewar modernism. Both exhibitions put emphasis on different artistic styles, yet used the overall interpretation of German art of the twentieth century as an 15

Press Release Martha Jackson Gallery, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (Germany), Deutsches Kunstarchiv, Heinz Trökes Papers, I, B–183. 16 German Art of the 20th Century, ed. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1957). 17 Howard Devree, “German Moderns. Emotion, Protest and Diversity Stamp Work in Modern Museum Show,” New York Times, October 6, 1957, 143. 18 Devree, “German Moderns.”

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argument in the debates on artistic freedom—for both art under totalitarian regimes as well as within the United States. This strategy paid off for German art—prices on the art market went up and, according to press reports, German art was again considered an important contribution to the European avant-garde in the twentieth century. However, over-emphasizing abstract art ultimately also meant the termination of pluralist stylistic experimentation after 1945 in favor of one style, singled-out in the ideology-driven cultural battle of the Cold War. Furthermore, the newly found ideological and economic success of abstract art was only valid for prewar modernism. Postwar abstract art, as Bernard Myers stated, remained to be seen as of minor quality and relevance: . . . We must contend with a considerable quantity of middle-of-the-road painting and sculpture, pleasant subjects in a pleasant manner, that clutter the annual exhibitions of Kunstvereine throughout Germany.19

German art after 1945 was uncritical pleasing art, which came across as uncontroversial and unprovocative in the eyes of the critics. Yet it became a powerful tool for a political agenda and for transmitting ideological messages. In the case of the Berlin Contemporary Artists exhibition, following a political agenda even went so far as to convey a distorted image of what was shown in the exhibition. Generating the impression that contemporary German art consisted mainly of abstract styles, as the publicized material on the exhibition had done, supported Myers’statement of German abstract art being the most predominant style after 1945. Yet reality was profoundly different. German artists were far from being certain which way to follow and how to develop a visual language responding to recent history. Contrary to what the AFA narrative suggested, harsh battles and disputes were fought over abstract art. Nevertheless, the post-1945 narratives and presentations of modern and contemporary abstract German art accommodated ideological interests. The hyperbolic claims for freedom, democracy, and individualism were projected so forcefully onto abstract art that an exhibition— particularly when organized and financed by US–American institutions— could not refrain from putting it into the center of attention, thus feeding into the perception that there was little else than abstract art to be found in Berlin and West Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

19

Myers, “Postwar Art,” 251.



CHAPTER ELEVEN THE RUSSIAN BOOM: ABSTRACT ART AS A MEANS FOR CULTURAL DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE SOVIET UNION AND WEST GERMANY (1970-1990) ELENA KOROWIN

The entangled relationship between the fine arts and diplomacy has a long historical tradition, prominent examples being the court painters working as diplomats during the Renaissance period. In his book Hofkünstler, art historian Martin Warnke discusses the various strategies of how monarchic dynasties used art and artists for diplomatic purposes.1 Enormous picture galleries were designed to awe the visitor, artworks were sent as diplomatic gifts to other courts, and if their creators personally delivered such gifts, it was an even bigger proof of esteem. This diplomatic tradition, rooted in the past, is still valid today—although the language of cultural diplomacy has changed, the strategies have remained the same. After five decades of the World’s Fair and the establishment of the Venice Biennale, the idea of art exhibitions as diplomatic instruments became a defining feature of the twentieth century. Throughout the centuries, various political establishments have believed in the suggestive power of art, however the exchange of art exhibitions between states in the twentieth century rarely led to the expected results. In this respect, the analysis of art exhibitions showing Russian art from the Soviet Union in West Germany in the period between the end of World War II and the breakdown of the communist system in 1991 is a characteristic example. This period was chosen because of the political tensions, which shaped the relations and cultural diplomacy between the 1

Martin Warnke, Hofkünstler. Zur Frühgeschichte des modernen Künstlers, 2nd ed. (Cologne: DuMont, 1996), 251–262.

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two states. A large numbers of exhibitions of Russian art took place, but a closer look reveals that only a few exhibitions were organized with the assistance of the Soviet government, including loans from Soviet institutions. In the early twentieth century, the first and only successful cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union was the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1922. This event became a historical reference point: later exhibitions tried to reconstruct the form of this first exhibition of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde. Although this exhibition was officially organized by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which had been founded on December 30, 1922, it was planned years before by Russian avant-garde artists, including El Lissitzky and Ivan Puni, to form an international union of avant-gardists. 2 This plan was integrated into the project of the exhibition by the cultural commission of the Ministry of Education, Narkompros. The official in charge was painter David Shterenberg—an acquaintance of Anatoly Lunacharsky and many other Soviet artists, among them Nathan Altman, Marc Chagall, and El Lissitzky.3 The First Russian Art Exhibition had a historical scope, it started with the art of the Russian Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), but the focal point was clearly the latest Russian art. This can also be seen in El Lissitzky’s layout of the catalog,4 which referred to the new approaches of Russian artists and thus matched the self-perception of the young Soviet state. In the preface, Shterenberg stresses the aim to appeal to the West through the art exhibited. 5 Beside classical categories like painting, graphics, and sculpture, the exhibition also featured sketches for theater costumes, posters, and porcelain. In the catalog, Shterenberg explained the development of Soviet artists, which, in his opinion, was directly influenced by the October Revolution of 1917.6 His foreword is a plea for a new cultural identity of Russia, which he saw best exemplified in the 2

The first initiators in 1918 were the Soviet People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, art critic Nicolai Punin, and artists David Shterenberg and Wassily Kandinsky. Germany as the “nearest neighbor” was contacted first to attempt rapprochement. Helen Adkins, “Erste Russische Kunstausstellung: Berlin 1922,” in Stationen der Moderne. Die bedeutendsten Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, ed. Berlinische Galerie, 2nd. ed. (Berlin: Nicolai, 1988), 185. 3 Ibid. 4 Eberhard Roters, ed., Erste Russische Kunstausstellung: Berlin 1922 (Berlin: Galerie van Diemen & Co., 1922; repr. Cologne: Walter König, 1988). 5 Introduction by Shterenberg in Roters, Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, 3–4. 6 Ibid., 4.



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exhibited w works of the avant-garde. a This T exhibitionn helped to sp pread the philosophy oof Soviet connstructivism accross Europe,, which was one o of the few successsful attempts of o a cultural approach a in thhe visual artss between two outlaweed states.7

W Fair 19937, German and a Soviet Figure 11.1. Heinrich Hofffmann, Paris World Pavilions. Hooffmann Archivve, Bayrische Sttaatsbibliothek, Munich.

After a period of liively culturall activity bettween the USSR and 8 Germany upp until the mid-1920s, m caame a periodd of stagnatio on in the exchange off art exhibitioons, which lasted for almoost fifty yearss. If there were culturaal diplomatic relations r betw ween the Sovieet Union and Germany in the 1930ss and 1940s att all, they were of a totally ddifferent nature, as can be seen in tthe photographh of the 1937 7 World’s Faiir in Paris, wh here Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz K Wom man faced thee German Reiichsadler. (Fig. 11.1) Althoughh the Russiaan avant-gard de had stronngly inspired German audiences, ccritics, and artists a in 1922 2, this was sooon forgotten n in both states. Afteer World Waar II, Germaan cultural ppolicy was staging s a 7 8



Adkins, “Errste Russische Kunstausstellun K ng,” 186. The First German Art Exhiibition was show wn in the USSR R in 1923.

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comprehensive campaign to rehabilitate the so-called degenerate art. Many exhibitions in the late 1940s and in the 1950s were displaying formerly forbidden artists in order to bring them back into the peoples’ minds—the most known and legendary exhibition was the first Documenta in Kassel in 1955.9 Only a few years later, exhibitions of Russian art were shown in West Germany. However, these were displaying artists in exile like Alexei Jawlensky, who was mainly working in Wiesbaden, Germany, or Marc Chagall, having been living in France and America since 1922. These artists were not even considered to be Russian, and even today many believe that Chagall was a French painter.10 The rehabilitation of the socalled degenerate art led to a revival of European constructivist ideas and was followed by a renewed appreciation of Russian nonobjective art of the early twentieth century. In the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the spirit of the Russian avant-garde was gradually revived, Russian art eventually gaining a positive image. The re-evaluation of the Russian contribution to the development of modern art made the First Russian Art Exhibition a legendary project. The fate of repressed, threatened, and finally forgotten Russian avant-garde artists touched Western society and gradually they were seen as adversaries to the official Soviet state artists of the late 1950s. The suprematists and constructivists were the “true” artists in contrast to the programmed zombies of the official Union of Artists, producing only party compliant so-called kitsch art, which, with its aesthetic language, reminded people of the art of their own disastrous Nazi past. While in the beginning and particularly during the First Russian Art Exhibition, Soviet artists of the avant-garde were seen as Other of the West,11 now avant-garde artists were made the other of the Soviet Union, disregarding the fact that they had positively accompanied national developments in the first years of the October Revolution. The issue of whether avant-garde art was in line with or 9

Arnold Bode, Documenta, Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts (1955; repr. Munich: Prestel, 1955). 10 Ada Raev, “Nationales Selbstverständnis, Präsentationsformen und Wahrnehmungsmuster Russischer Kunst im Westen,” in Kursschwankungen: Russische Kunst im Wertesystem der europäischen Moderne, ed. Ada Raev and Isabel Wünsche (Berlin: Lukas, 2007), 35. Quoting English Wikipedia to underline the common understanding of Marc Chagall referred to as a French artist: “Marc Chagall, Nationality: Russian, later known as French,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall, last accessed August, 20, 2013. 11 This definition is borrowed from Boris Groys, who used it with a different meaning in Boris Groys, Die Erfindung Russlands (Berlin: Carl Hanser, 1995), 19–35.



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adverse towards Soviet nationalism was brought up for the first time in exhibitions of the 1970s. Thus, the unilateral perception of the Russian avant-garde phenomenon in the early postwar period contradicted the rigorous refusal of official Soviet culture to deal with its own avant-garde artists. Regarding this conflict of positioning Russian avant-garde artists in relation to Soviet nationalism, it does not come as a surprise that until 1973 there was no official base for cultural exchange between the USSR and the FRG.12 With antithetic conceptions of art and incompatible ideas regarding the autonomy of the artist, there was no mutual platform for discussions of artistic issues. Furthermore, the Adenauer period (1949– 1963) can be characterized by its Western orientation in all areas: economic, political, and cultural. The cultural relations between the FRG and the USSR in terms of the visual arts stagnated, not least because of the extensive engagement and influence of American art in West Germany. Meanwhile, a carefully arranged exhibition program was shown in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), developed specifically for the socialist countries. It was displaying different aspects of socialist realism and novelties in the socialist artistic production. 13 During this time, socialist realism did not receive consent in the West, which is another reason as to why the visual arts could not play a significant role in the cultural exchange with West Germany. Searching for an appropriate expression, artists in Europe and the United States mainly worked in nonobjective styles, which was pejoratively termed “formalism” in socialist countries. The West German art scene of the 1950s was dominated by the notion of “abstraction as a world language.” 14 West German artists looked westward to Paris and later New York, where art informel, minimal art, and abstract expressionism celebrated their triumphs. Soviet cultural officials were aware of this situation and focused on the export of music, literature, sports, and dance as the only cultural products appropriate to be used for diplomatic purposes in Europe. 15 Soviet musicians like David Oistrakh continuously toured Europe since

12

Barbara Lippert, Auswärtige Kulturpolitik im Zeichen der Ostpolitik. Verhandlungen mit Moskau 1969–1990 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1996), 191. 13 Christian Saehrendt, Kunst als Botschafter einer künstlichen Nation (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009), 59–91. 14 Kay Hemer and Susanne Rennert, ed., Le Grand Geste! Informel und Abstrakter Expressionismus 1946–1964 (Cologne: Dumont; 2010). 15 Lippert, Auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 373–387.



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the 1950s, but Russian visual art was almost forgotten.16 However, in the 1950s, Western art historians made an effort to rehabilitate one form of Russian art: the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century was gradually brought back into the West’s collective memory, while in the USSR their works were stored in museum vaults. Many works by Kandinsky, Malevich, Lissitzky, and other representatives of this movement were located in the West, for example, in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. 17 Therefore, the Russian avant-garde movement was partially reconstructed through exhibitions taking place at the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s. The Contribution of Russians to Modern Art was the programmatic title of the first exhibition of Russian avant-garde art in the FRG. 18 It was shown in 1959 in the Carmelite monastery in Frankfurt am Main. The loans came mainly from Germany and France, and partly from the artists themselves. 19 The organizer, Dr. Karl von Rath, saw the project as a first attempt to reconstruct a forgotten part of art history—the contribution of the Russians to modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, he found it surprising that no one before him had brought up this issue.20 In 16

Lippert, Auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 373–387. Before both World Wars many Russian artists lived and worked in the West (i.e. Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova in Berlin, Munich and Paris). After World War I, many artistic bonds were formed again between West and East, especially after the First Russian Art Exhibition. Numerous Soviet artists fled from the revolution and the civil war, but some of the artists who stayed were able to travel to Paris or Berlin. Malevich left a big part of his suprematist works in Germany when he left Berlin to go back to the USSR in 1927. Lisstzky visited Hannover and Cologne several times. Eberhard Steneberg and Heinz Vogel, ed., Der Beitrag der Russen zur modernen Kunst (Düsseldorf: Heinrich Winterscheid, 1959). 18 Ibid. 19 Exhibited artists: Alexander Archipenko, Chagall, Serge Charchoune, Sonia Delaunay–Terk, Naum Gabo, Goncharova, Jawlenskij, Kandinskiy, André Lanskoy, Larionov, Lissitzky, Malevich, Pavel Mansurov, Antoine Pevsner, Serge Poliakoff, Jean Pougny, Nikolas de Staël, Vladimir Zabotin, Ossip Zadkin. The majority of the exhibited artists were living in European exile for years already. Partially they were no longer perceived as Russian, but as French or American artists. This is obvious in the way some of the names were transliterated in the catalog. The biographic notes demonstrate that many of the artists still had a vivid exhibition practice. Pevsner und Zabotin were showing in big exhibitions in the FRG and Chagall had large retrospectives in Hamburg und Munich in 1959 (Steneberg and Vogel, Der Beitrag der Russen zur modernen Kunst, 5–20). 20 Ibid. 17



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the catalog, Eberhard Steneberg points out the great influence of the École Russe on contemporary artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others who painted in abstract terms. He called for a reconstruction of this forgotten but important art movement with united force.21

The rise of the Russian avant-garde in West Germany A specifically Western idea of what the Russian avant-garde is or was came about in the 1960s. In Leverkusen, works by Malevich from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum and the private collection of Hans von Riesen were shown.22 In Berlin, a survey of Russian nonobjective art took place five years later, it also consisted exclusively of Western loans. 23 Crucial to the rediscovery of Russian nonobjective art was the groundbreaking book, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922, published by the British art historian Camilla Gray in 1963.24 A few years later, she was responsible for the exhibition Art in Revolution, organized by the British Council in London in 1971 and subsequently shown, without the loans from the USSR, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Cologne.25 Even the title of the exhibition drew attention to the hitherto forgotten connection of the avant-garde and the October Revolution. Gray’s book and the exhibition were the first Western attempts to show a conclusive history of the avant-garde movement. The projects made direct reference to the 1922 exhibition. The presentation of the movement did not only include the fine but also the applied arts, i.e., architecture, product design, theater, and film; showing the whole spectrum of avant-garde art production. In contrast, the first exhibition of Russian art that included Soviet loans was shown in Baden–Baden in 1972; it presented the art of the Russian realists from the nineteenth century, mainly the group of the Peredvizhniki.26 This exhibition was due to the efforts of Klaus Gallwitz, director of the Kunsthalle Baden–Baden at the time. Upon personal 21

Steneberg and Vogel, Der Beitrag der Russen zur modernen Kunst, 5–20. Udo Kultermann, ed., Kasimir Malewitsch (Leverkusen: H. Koopmann & Co., 1962). 23 Eberhard Roters, ed., Avantgarde Osteuropa 1910–1930 (Berlin: Brüder Hartmann, 1967). 24 Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962). 25 Georg Bussmann, ed., Kunst in der Revolution (Frankfurt/M.: Johannes Alt, 1972). 26 Klaus Gallwitz, ed., Russischer Realismus 1850–1900 (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller, 1972). 22



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request, he managed to get the loans from the Tretjakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in Leningrad, well before any official contracts concerning cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the FRG were signed.27 He was able to lend these works because he did it at his own risk. The Soviet officials were proud to showcase the Peredvizhniki because these artists were not only considered main cultural heritage in painting, but officially seen as historical ancestors of socialist realism.28 Gallwitz was aware of the fact that realism was a controversial issue in Germany, but he also understood that the Soviets would neither lend him the works of banned avant-garde artists nor icons. He also knew that a request for official approved contemporary Soviet art would be unsalable because, at this time, this art was as undesirable in West Germany as nonobjective art was in the USSR.29 One of the conditions imposed by his Soviet partners was an exhibition of German realist art in Moscow and Leningrad. Gallwitz organized a grand show of German realism in Russia, taking care of all twenty-three lenders himself.30 These bilateral events were fruitful to both sides.31 The exchange continued and gradually some works of the avant-garde were removed from the vaults of Soviet museums to be shown in West Germany. These works were lent only on request and the officials responsible tried to restrict the lending to only figurative works, even of avant-garde artists such as Malevich or Tatlin.32 The first exhibition, 60 Years of Soviet Painting, which was planned by the Soviet Union for the FRG, was more than just a response to requests.33 On the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, 111 works from various regions of the Soviet Union were shown in Wiesbaden in 1977. Art critic Rene Drommert emphasized in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit that, in spite of the official character of the show, it was of better quality than the Soviet exhibitions which had previously been shown in

27

Lippert, Auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 191, 321. Gallwitz, Russischer Realismus 1850–1900. 29 Klaus Gallwitz, interview by the author, August 2, 2011. 30 Klaus Gallwitz, ed., Deutsche Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert: eine Ausstellung für Moskau und Leningrad (Frankfurt/M.: Städel, 1975). 31 The exhibition in Baden–Baden had 30,000 visitors. In Moscow and Leningrad, about 100,000 visitors saw the exhibition. 32 Klaus Gallwitz, ed., Russische Malerei 1980–1917 (Frankfurt/M.: Städel, 1978). 33 Magistrat der Landeshauptstadt Wiesbaden, ed., 60 Jahre sowjetische Malerei (1917–1977) (Wiesbaden: Oscar Brandstetter, 1977). 28



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the West.34 The works on view provided a broad overview of Soviet art. As is typical for the Ministry of Culture in Moscow, Kandinsky and Malevich, each with only one work, were exhibited as representatives of abstract art. The main body of the exhibition consisted of works of socialist realism, a movement which was explored in all its facets.35 This overview was intended to represent a broad variety of official Soviet art, a fact that was frequently stressed by Valentin Falin, the Soviet ambassador, in his official speeches.36 As a first attempt to defuse the growing myth of the Russian avant-garde, Malevich, one of its patriarchs, was presented as a realist convert in one of the catalog essays: In various ways, through most diverse stylistic experiments, the artists came to a realist view of the world. There is no convincing example of the absolute necessity of this movement as the creative development of K. Malevich, a founder of abstract painting. His late self-portrait is not only a witness of the artist's return to figurative art, but also a shining example of the confluence of formal experience of suprematism with the new conception of man. The rigorous, high-minded attitude of the artist, the harmonious flow of pure clear colours, give the portrait a deep humanistic thought.37

Malevich’s Self-portrait (1933), in which he shows himself in the style of a Renaissance master (Plate 11.1), has been presented by Soviet art historian M. V. Davydova as a reason for Malevich’s rise after he concluded his suprematist experiment.38 It is evident that this picture had two important functions in the exhibition in Wiesbaden, namely to affirm the official Soviet view on art as well as to deconstruct the Western art historical evaluation of Malevich, which had been developed in the FRG since the late 1950s. This early example of cultural diplomacy taking place in a museum outside of the major art centers was continued three years later in a monographic Malevich exhibition in Düsseldorf. In 1980, Jürgen Harten displayed Kasimir Malevich (1978–1935). Works From Soviet Collections at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.39 The concept of this exhibition 34

René Drommert, “Auffällig: Das Unauffällige,” Die Zeit, December 2, 1977, n.

p. 35

Magistrat der Landeshauptstadt Wiesbaden, 60 Jahre sowjetische Malerei. Ibid. 37 Ibid., 7. 38 Ibid. 39 Jürgen Harten, ed., Kasimir Malewitsch (1878–1935) Werke aus sowjetischen Sammlungen (Düsseldorf: Hub. Hoch 1980). 36



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had been developed in the USSR with Soviet art historians producing the catalog—to the extent that Harten had almost no influence on the exhibition. The emphasis was clearly put on the late work of Malevich, which made this exhibition an art-historical sensation.40 It seemed as if no one in the West was aware of the fact that the artist was painting figuratively in his late work. In the press, the exhibition caused vigorous speculation on Malevich’s reasons for this artistic turn—it was speculated whether the artist was forced to turn away from suprematism or whether he made the decision himself.41 Once again, it is obvious that an attempt was made to shake the image of Malevich in the West. However, this attempt was only partly successful. The exhibition was planned as a tour and should have been transferred to Hamburg and Baden–Baden after Düsseldorf, but it found a disreputable end. One week before its closing in Düsseldorf, all works exhibited were requested back to the Soviet Union. The agreements with Hamburg and Baden–Baden were canceled, which led to a direct indignation in the press. The reasons for recalling the works were not elaborated, and thus, the newspapers started speculating once more. Decades later, former ambassador of the USSR, Vladimir Semyonov, told Jürgen Harten who gave the recall-order: Much later, when he retired, Vladimir Semyonov told me, that Michail Suslov made the order. He let someone write an article against Malevich in Pravda, and what was written in this newspaper counted ex cathedra.42

These examples demonstrate the concerted efforts of Soviet diplomacy, which, in contrast to the disparate attempts of German diplomacy, always carefully focused on limiting the amount of works by the so-called formalists as much as possible. Furthermore, the Soviet organizers made an attempt to use these works for manipulating the development of Russian and Soviet art history. This was done by omitting or, as in the case of Malevich, by offering new interpretations of the artist’s development. Obviously, the whole movement of the Russian avant-garde 40

Jürgen Harten, ed., Kasimir Malewitsch (1878–1935) Werke aus sowjetischen Sammlungen (Düsseldorf: Hub. Hoch 1980). 41 For example Wolfgang Richter, “Der Unbekannte Malewitsch,” Aachener Volkszeitung, March, 3, 1980; Amine Haase, “Ich bin dem Kreis der Dinge entkommen,” Kölner Stadtanzeiger, March, 8, 1980; Raimund Hoghe, “Bilder der Rückkehr,” Die Zeit, March, 14, 1980; Eo Plunien, “. . . und heimlich malte er gegenständlich,” Die Welt, March, 3, 1980. 42 Pavel Choroshilov and Jürgen Harten, ed., Moskau–Berlin 1950–2000 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2003), 89.



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became a figurehead for Soviet diplomacy and a constant benchmark for the development of the artistic exchange between West Germany and the USSR. Malevich, one of the main representatives of this art movement, became the protagonist of diplomatic efforts.

Conclusion Between 1950 and 1980, exhibitions of the Russian avant-garde in the West showed the avant-garde under the “gaze of the other” because the presentations were prepared in the West and thus had a unilateral western conception. Materials about this movement accessible in Western Europe were not differentiated enough to provide a complete overview. Important information on the development of the artists was missing since the 1920s and many names were unknown or disregarded outside the Soviet Union. The belief that the avant-garde had been almost destroyed by the communist regime gave the legend of the Russian utopian movement the necessary drama to reinforce the myth. The first shows with new conceptual approaches were shown in the FRG in the 1970s. Art In Revolution (1972) referred to the First Russian Art Exhibition, which had been shown in Berlin fifty years earlier. Although no loans from the USSR were included, a more complete overview and better classification of the political movement could be made in contrast to the previous show in London, which had also received loans from the USSR.43 In the FRG, this exhibition was supposed to act against simplifications that were applied to the avant-garde artists, something director George Bussmann emphasized in the catalog.44 This task proved to be extremely difficult because of the strong stereotypes that had been present in people’s minds. Exhibitions designed by the Soviet Union were intended to influence this but did not have the expected success. An example is the Malevich exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1980. Here, the Soviets tried to actively pursue a foreign policy of consciousness—they wanted to revise the Western idea of the protagonists of the avant-garde and present a more favorable image of the USSR. The avant-garde issue was even raised by the press in projects in which it was irrelevant, for example, in relation to the exhibition of Russian realists in Baden–Baden in 1972.45 43

Georg Bussmann, Kunst in der Revolution, 1972. Ibid. 45 For example: Hans Otto Fehr, “Leben unterm Zarenadler,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, December 6, 1972; Anonymous, “Malerei in Rußland 1850–1900,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 8, 1972. 44



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On the occasion of an exhibition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, journalists tried to figure out why avant-garde works from Soviet museum vaults were not exhibited in Germany and why the Peredvizhniki were described in the catalog as direct ancestors of socialist realism. Critics complained that nonobjective and progressive art movements inbetween these two realist periods were erased.46 The art of the USSR was not considered unconditionally—the accessible material was always mingled with stereotypes, including platitudes about the Soviet Union and its culture. One of the critics considered the Russian avant-garde as a martyr of the October Revolution and thus as opposing socialist realism. The quality of Soviet exhibitions in Germany was generally measured by how many avant-garde works were borrowed from Soviet institutions. This demonstrates to what extent German art historians and critics accused the Soviet cultural and political system to denounce its best artists. Two contradictory dogmas met each other: the notion of art put forth by the USSR and that of the FRG. Both were complicated—on the one hand, the Soviet struggle against formalism in art, and on the other the growing Western veneration of the Russian avant-garde. It is notable that, regardless of the different political systems, both states believed in the power of art as an instrument for cultural diplomacy and selfrepresentation. But the introduction and promotion of their own art into another system with a different idea of cultural production seemed to be rather difficult.

Collecting and exhibiting the Russian avant-garde In the postwar period, collecting Russian avant-garde art became a preferred activity of German patrons; it was an effective way to demonstrate status as a true connoisseur. Wilhelm Hack, Friedrich Wilhelm Christians, and Peter Ludwig were the most illustrious collectors of Russian avant-garde art in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Several factors played a role in provoking such an enthusiasm for collecting Russian suprematism and constructivism: First of all, the abovementioned re-evaluation of the importance of this art and secondly, an archaeological sensationalism, implied by this rediscovery. There was also Antonina Gmurzynska, an ambitious gallery owner from Poland, who was promoting East European avant-garde art in Cologne beginning in the late 46

For example: Hans Otto Fehr, “Leben unterm Zarenadler,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, December 6, 1972; Anonymous, “Malerei in Rußland 1850–1900,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 8, 1972.



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1960s. A highly controversial person, who contributed significantly to establishing the Russian avant-garde in the West, she left open just as many questions about provenances, authenticity, and acquisition methods.47 Her decision to open a gallery in Cologne was strategically wise because of the close vicinity to Bonn, seat of the West German government at the time. Thus, many influential visitors attended her exhibition openings, which turned into major political, cultural, and social events. She also belonged to the preferred people of the Soviet ambassadors, although it is paradoxical that someone, who was committed to officially denouncing this kind of art, could reach such a position.48 Gmurzynska significantly contributed to the general rediscovery of the avant-garde in West Germany. In 1977, a part of the George Costakis Collection was displayed in Düsseldorf, which was a sensation and also made for an extraordinary contribution to scientific research on the Russian avant-garde. Just like the artists, the most important collector of nonfigurative art from the USSR was celebrated as a hero by the German media. In the 1970s, everyone who was involved with suprematism and constructivism knew the name of Costakis and his story. He was a Russian-born Greek who had survived all challenges of the early twentieth century in Moscow—the October Revolution and both World Wars. In his memoirs, he admits that he always wanted to do something great, and fortunately he decided to collect art.49 He started to buy third-class Dutch masters, icons, and folk art but knew that this collection would never become extraordinary. After the end of World War II, he discovered works by Olga Rozanova (Plate 11.2) and had an epiphanic experience: He committed himself to researching these artists and collecting their works, something nobody remembered in the postwar period. 47

Claudia Herstatt draws a very positive picture of Gmurzynska: “Antonina Gmurzynska made it her vocation in life to rescue these treasures and make them available to a wider public. This graceful little lady displayed astounding energy, and pursued her mission with collectors and in museums. ‘My mother,’ Krystyna Gmurzynska says proudly, ‘was a visionary who was successful primarily because she was acting from a deep conviction and could thus convincingly represent the art that she exhibited.’” Claudia Herstatt, Women Gallerists in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Ostfildern: Hantje Cantz, 2008), 38–39. In contrast to that, Ingeborg Prior characterizes the gallerist as a cruel and unscrupulous person. Ingeborg Prior, Sophies Vermächtnis (Knaur: München 2006). 48 Ibid. 49 Peter Roberts, George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art (Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1994).



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Chapter Eleven I collected old Dutch, porcelain, Russian silver, tapestry and fabrics. But I thought all the time that if I continue like this, then I will achieve nothing for the art. Everything of what I collected already was stored in the Louvre and the Hermitage, yes, probably, in every large museum of any country and even in private collections. If I had pursued this direction, I could become rich, but . . . not more. But I wanted to do something extraordinary. One day entirely unexpected I happened to be in a Moscow apartment . . . I saw two or three canvases of the avant-gardists there, one of them—Olga Rozanova’s. . . . The works left such a great impression . . . . And so I bought pictures of avant-gardists, carried them home and hung them near the Dutch paintings. And there was this feeling, that I had lived in a room with a closed curtain, and now they were opened and the sun was shining in. From this time on I decided to separate myself from everything I collected before and to buy only the avant-garde. This happened in 1946.50

It was not only a quest, but a true chase—the works were often not considered as art and were used instead as furniture or for covering holes in roofs. 51 Most of the living artists no longer held on to their former beliefs. For Costakis, this meant an advantage towards his goal: without huge financial investments, he, the employee of the Canadian embassy, could put together an incredible collection. He met Stepanova, Tatlin, Chagall, and Kliun, the latter had worked together with Malevich in Vitebsk and was one of his closest protégés.52 The uniqueness of Costakis’ collection is that he was able to track the movement of the Russian avantgarde as a whole.53 He acquired works by the leading artists of the avantgarde as well as by their students and followers.54 He rediscovered works of Rodchenko, met the artist in his apartment in Moscow, and, in a lumber room, he found the nowadays well-known Spatial Construction no.12, which has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1986.55 The collection was stored and exhibited in Costakis’ 50

Roberts, George Costakis. Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 An overview of all artists from the Costakis Collection can be found here: Angelica Zander Rudenstine, ed., Russische Avantgarde-Kunst aus der Sammlung George Costakis (Cologne: DuMont, 1981). 54 The leading artists of the avant-garde in the collection: Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Gustav Klucis, Ivan Kliun, Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Nicolai Suetin, Vladimir Tatlin, Nadeshda Udalcova. 55 “Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions,” Museum of Modern Art, http://www. moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/ texts/spatial_construct.html. 51



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apartment in Moscow. In the 1960s, he began to invite people to his private museum and thus, a visit at Costakis became an insider tip in Moscow, particularly for foreigners and cultural tourists. The visitor books show the growing interest in his collection by influential foreigners: diplomats, museum directors, artists, and musicians came to see Russian avant-garde art.56 (Fig. 11.2) Costakis’ collection became famous and, in the 1970s, the first newspaper articles about his collection were published in England and Germany.57 At the same time, Costakis experienced how dangerous his activities were during this decade: After many threats and attempts of defamation from the security agency KGB, Costakis found a way to escape. He was allowed to leave the USSR but had to donate the larger part of his collection to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.58 Even after the collection was divided into two unequal parts, Costakis still received much attention for the smaller part of his collection in Europe and the United States. The Deutsche Bank, particularly its chairman Friedrich Wilhelm Christians, served as an important supporter of Costakis’ efforts to exhibit his collection in Germany. Before Costakis left the Soviet Union, parts of his collection were shown in Düsseldorf. However, just as suddenly as Costakis had become well-known, his fame decreased. The Costakis episode did not provide good publicity for the Soviet government—rather it highlighted a series of scandalous cases of expatriation and emigration of representatives of cultural life and the intelligentsia in the 1970s. In an effort to counter this, Soviet museums began to open their vaults to the West in the 1980s.

56

The visitor books are in the collection of the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, available at http://www.greekstatemuseum.com/kmst/collections/ db/search.html?primary_control_0=DE&secondary_control_0=I&tertiary_control_ dropdown_0=62. 57 Hermann Pörzgen, “Privatmuseum in Moskau,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 13, 1972; Bruce Chatwin, “Moscow’s Unofficial Art,” The Sunday Times, March 6, 1973. 58 Roberts, George Costakis.



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Figure 11.2. Alexander Rodchenko, Spatial Construction no. 12, c. 1920–1921. Reconstruction by Aleksandr Lavrentiev, 1989. Plywood, wire, 61 x 83.7 x 47 cm. Private collection, Moscow.

The popularity of the avant-garde after 1991 The Russian avant-garde did not lose its appeal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This is proved by a number of great exhibitions that were shown in Germany in the 1990s, among them The Great Utopia: The Russian Avant-garde 1915–1932, shown in Frankfurt am Main in 1992.59 Jürgen Harten organized the first Tatlin retrospective in Düsseldorf and Baden–Baden in 1993;60 the Museum Ludwig in Cologne presented the Russian Avant-garde in the 20th Century: From Malevich to Kabakov (1993–1994) and Kazimir Malevich: Work and Influence (1995–1996),

59

Bettina-Martine Wolter and Bernhart Schwenk, eds., Die grosse Utopie. Die Russische Avantgarde 1915–1932 (Frankfurt/M.: Kulturgesellschaft Frankfurt, 1992). 60 Jürgen Harten and Anatoly Strigalyov, eds., Vladimir Tatlin. Retrospektive (Cologne: DuMont, 1993).



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both including works from the Ludwig collection. 61 The shows of the Ludwig-dependence in Cologne demonstrated the changed focus in the exhibition policy of the collection in the 1990s: official Soviet artists, hitherto praised by the collector and staff, were now being replaced by avant-garde artists. Without further ado, the unofficial artists of the 1980s were incorporated into the avant-garde exhibitions. This certainly was thought to suggest a common spirit of artists like Malevich and Kabakov. The works of the Moscow conceptualists were often related to the avantgarde, as the utopian dreams of the suprematists and constructivists gave the later developments in the USSR the perfect raw material for critical analysis and ironic comments. Ilya Kabakov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Dmitry Prigov, and many others have used the artistic language of the avant-garde to satirize a lost utopia. It seems to have been a convenient solution for Western art historians to combine all unofficial artists from the 1970s to the 1990s under the term “second avant-garde,” again greatly simplifying Soviet art history. Whether the Ludwig collection or temporary exhibitions—the Russian avant-garde was still in high demand in the 1990s, whereby Russia could prove itself to be a generous partner by lending avant-garde works to Germany and other countries. Russian experts would even emphasize that, even in Soviet times, they had been able to appreciate the value of the avant-garde works which they had carefully kept in museum vaults. Malevich and his colleagues remain to be figureheads of Russian cultural diplomacy until today. Meanwhile, Russian realist art that was highly praised for decades by Soviet cultural officials has mostly disappeared in the vaults.

61

Evelyn Weiss, ed., Russische Avantgarde im 20. Jahrhundert. Von Malewitsch bis Kabakov. Die Sammlung Ludwig Köln (Munich: Prestel, 1993); Evelyn Weiss, ed., Kasimir Malewitsch. Werk und Wirkung (Cologne: DuMont, 1995).





CHAPTER TWELVE ABSTRACT ART IN SOUTH AFRICA: THEN AND NOW MARILYN MARTIN

This article has to be read in the context of the history of abstract expression in southern Africa1 that can be traced back to two pieces of ochre, engraved with abstract designs, which are about 70,000 to 80,000 years old. The meaning is not known, but the carefully and clearly incised diamond-shaped patterns on the Blombos Ochre may represent information, a form of communication or abstract symbolism, and they may be the oldest known artworks.2 Abstraction—both as a practice and a principle—is an integral part of cultural production in Africa. Abstract symbols are found on the rock paintings and engravings of San people, the earliest hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. This art, created over thousands of years, focused on the spirit world journeys and experiences of their shamans. Interspersed with the figurative elements are a plethora of abstract symbols—natural and 1

The focus in the article is on two-dimensional works. They were discovered in 1991 by Professor Chris Henshilwood, under whose direction the Blombos Cave, situated in a limestone cliff near Still Bay on the southern Cape coast, was excavated (1997–2009); they are housed in the Iziko South African Museum. These findings are rewriting the history of human development in terms of intelligent mark making and symbolic behavior, which predate discoveries made elsewhere in the world by over 40,000 years. The site is famous for the discovery of these two pieces of engraved ochre, as well as 75,000– year-old beads made from Nassarius shells, c. 80,000–year-old bone tools, and a complex tool kit that may have been used for body decoration. Some of the earliest evidence for shell fishing and possibly fishing was discovered at the site dating to approximately 140,000 years ago; see “Blombos Cave,” University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, http://www.wits.ac.za/academic/research/ihe/ archaeology/blombos/ 7106/blomboscave.html. 2

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supernatural forces, and ideas about the nature of their universe. The Bantu people who migrated south brought with them rich traditions of mural painting, ornament on ceramic vessels and textiles, beadwork, and the decoration of functional objects such as headrests and ceremonial staffs. The abstract roots and transcendental potentialities of African art run deep: Traditional art is not drawn from a naturalistic depiction of African life. It does not intend to be a photographic reproduction of African experience but, through its stylisation, it echoes African myths and beliefs. It is an integral part of African religion and it is spiritually empowering.3

One of South Africa’s earliest and leading abstractionists was Ernest Methuen Mancoba (1904–2002). He attended the University of Fort Hare and obtained a BA degree through the University of South Africa. Mancoba had no formal art training, but he exceled as a sculptor and received a number of commissions for churches. He was granted a scholarship and in 1938 he left South Africa to study at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He was a prominent member of an avant-garde group of abstract painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (CoBrA) active from 1948 to 1951, yet his achievements have not been acknowledged in standard histories.4 Analyzing Mancoba’s Composition of 1940, Rasheed Araeen (2004) concludes that his work was “a precursor or forerunner of what emerged a few years later: abstract expressionism—even though he did not influence the movement. What I am suggesting is that Mancoba’s work may represent a historical breakthrough within the mainstream modernism.” 5 This argument significantly reframes art historian Olu Oguibe’s position regarding Mancoba’s role in African modernism:6

3

Matsemela Manaka, Echoes of African Art (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1987), 10. In 1961, Mancoba became a French citizen and in 1994, after an absence of fiftysix years, he visited South Africa for the first time for his retrospective exhibition in Johannesburg and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. 5 In his article, Araeen draws an interesting comparison between Pablo Picasso moving from Spain and Ernest Mancoba from South Africa. Rasheed Araeen, “Return To the Source” (keynote address, 24th Annual Conference of the South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH), University of Stellenbosch, September 4–6, 2008). 6 Olu Oguibe, “Reverse Appropriation as Nationalism in Early Modern African Art,” in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, eds. Rasheed Araeen, Ziauddin Sardar, Sean Cubitt (London: Continuum, 2002), 45. 4



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The new strategy, evident in the work of Ernest Mancoba from the mid1930s, involved a redefinition of African modernism by electing classical African art as its model. It displaced the iconography of the European Enlightenment and chose African sculpture and forms as the source of inspiration, the point of departure and yet, the frame of reference. Its intent was a new aesthetic. Conceptually, this new aesthetic also effectively conflated European and African modernisms by writing African art as a common frame and subtext of all modernisms. Rather than quote premodernist western form as did Onabolu and Mohl, or western modernism as had Sekoto, Mancoba referenced African sculpture on the specifically modernist principle of formalist articulation.7

Mancoba would continue to bring together African and Western cultural experiences in his paintings until his death, and to do so through abstraction. Like many of his works, Untitled (1971) was inspired by Kota reliquary sculpture from West Africa; he analyzed the original until he found its essence and then re-interpreted it in his characteristic free and dynamic marks and a rich palette. (Plate 12.1) For Araeen, Mancoba is not only Africa’s most original modern artist, but, more importantly, he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority and demolishes it from within. He thus rejects the view that the colonised had no choice but to mimic.8

Mancoba had much in common with artist and teacher Walter Battiss (1906–1982), another important precursor figure, in preparing the way for an art that no longer had as its sole purpose the imitation of nature. Inspired by San rock art, Battiss exhibited abstract works as early as 1937, albeit under a pseudonym, and he continued to work in this manner throughout his life.9 His many statements on the role of the artist provide, with those of Bill Ainslie (1934–1989), Kevin Atkinson (1939–2007), and Ricky Burnett (b. 1949), a theoretical basis for figurative and nonfigurative abstraction in South Africa. Battiss described his approach to painting as “intuitive” and reliant on meditation, yet he was clear on the artist’s responsibility: “Art very definitely exposes the guilt of the 7

Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) was a precursor of Modernism in Nigeria, as were John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985) and Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993) in South Africa). 8 Araeen, “Return To the Source,” 5. 9 Murray Schoonraad, Walter Battiss (Cape Town: Struik, 1976), 12.



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onlooker . . . I actually think it is one of the duties of the dedicated artist to face society with its crimes and reveal guilt.”10 He was openly critical of artists who slavishly followed European and American trends, and suggested that South Africa started “its art all over again . . . finding its roots here.”11 In the Department of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, there was a fulcrum of interest in modernism in the 1930s, which resulted in an avant-garde manifesto, initiated by proponents and practitioners of an anti-historicist, progressive architecture in tune with its times. It was led by Gordon McIntosh (1904–1983), Norman Hanson (1909–1991) and Rex Martienssen (1905–1942). The manifesto, entitled zerohour, was issued on April 1, 1933; their sources of inspiration were Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. A conference and exhibition, Abstract Art, organized by the Architectural Students’ Society, followed in 1937; the focus was on abstraction in painting, photography, and architecture, but the examples shown and discussed (some original works from private collections, copies, and reproductions) were really late-cubist works by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger, amongst others, as well as Purist paintings by Le Corbusier and Amadée Ozenfant and two abstract paintings by Wassily Kandinsky. The Russian constructivists, the suprematist Kasimir Malevich, and the artists and architects of De Stijl did not feature. Be that as it may, these were extraordinary initiatives at a time when the revolutionary art forms that had emerged in Europe were of little or no interest to most South African universities, museums and critics. These institutions were comfortable in their reactionary cultural backwater, a situation that would only begin to change in the 1960s. During the 1950s many established white artists, who had been prevented by World War II from studying abroad, and who had worked in isolation from contemporary international movements, were enthusiastic about the challenging new possibilities of which abstraction was one; the younger generation was immediately responsive to the modern idioms. However, artists returning home from London and Paris after the War found hostile receptions for their new ideas about art. Erik Laubscher (1927–2013) fought many a battle as an activist for modernism. Progressive, idealistic, and influential, he used his roles as artist, teacher, and critic to advance the cause of nonfigurative art. He 10

For statements by Battiss, see Karin Skawran and Michael Macnamara, eds., Walter Battiss (Cape Town: A.D. Donker, 1985), 11–19. 11 Ibid.



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studied in Cape Town, London, and in Paris under Fernand Léger in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Léger’s influence is apparent in works that are almost sculptural in the exploration of different shapes that overlap at times, and contrasting layers of texture and color. They anticipate his later paintings, which—after a visit to America in 1966—became increasingly hard-edged and smooth. Laubscher made the new trends applicable to the South African landscape and his love of still life, thereby forging a personal vision and expression and at the same time resolving the modernist tension between form and reference. Like Battiss, he criticized artists who slavishly followed international examples. Albert Newall (1920–1989), well known as a photographer and particularly for his book Images of the Cape (1965), was also a vocal advocate for and an early and consistent practitioner of abstraction. His exhibitions provoked outrage in the daily press; yet he won a major sculpture competition in 1957 and represented South Africa at the São Paulo (1959 and 1961) and Venice Biennales (1964). He had a predilection for pure geometric forms and he was familiar with the philosophy and methods of De Stijl, as well as Bauhaus and Kandinsky. Trevor Coleman (b. 1936), influential gallerist and editor of Gallery magazine, wrote an article entitled “Hard-edge Painting” in Artlook,12 in which he gave an overview of the origins and current manifestations of the style, internationally and in South Africa: In South Africa the hard-edge movement is slowly taking on some importance. Kevin Atkinson won the Gold Medal with his acrylic on canvas, “Aqua-A-Blast” at the 1966 S.A. Breweries Biennale. This year Hans Potgieter won the Everite prize for painting for his “Zero (B) Sideview” at the 15th (1969) Transvaal Academy. Cecily Sash has also won numerous prizes for her hard-edge paintings. Other artists who realize how important this movement is in expressing the contemporary way of life are Hannetjie van der Wat and Maurice Kahn. (Plate 12.2)

Coleman became one of the few local exponents of op art and the shaped canvas, albeit offering a vision gentler than the hallucinatory and disturbing effects and negative aftereffects of encounters with the paintings of Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and Richard Anuszkiewicz. His works conjure up subtle optical responses, in which complimentary

12



Trevor Coleman, “Hard-edge Painting,” Artlook, July (1969): 14–15.

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colors, repetitive geometric structures, and tonal modulations combine, the artwork being resolved in the exploitation of perceptual ambiguities.13 Hannatjie van der Wat (b. 1923) is a pioneer female abstract artist. Numbered modules or titles such as Visual Experience and Modular Horizontals point to the primacy of shapes, color combinations, and the resultant visual experience. This she achieved by means of meticulously constructed, alternating horizontal and vertical flat planes and lines that are rendered dynamic with triangular thrusts; they touch delicately and tentatively, thereby producing powerful spatial tensions. American paintings were big and to achieve the same impact, Van der Wat combined modules of two or four that fit together.14 Since her participation in Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, Ndebele artist Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) has transposed her mural painting skills, acquired from her mother, onto two dimensions, creating a geometric abstraction of her own and gaining international fame. In 1991 she was commissioned to decorate a BMW Art Car, the first female artist to join luminaries like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and David Hockney in the program. She has executed murals at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC (1997) and the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany (2004). As painterly abstraction gained ground internationally and became fashionable from the 1950s, many South African artists took to it. The South African participation in the 1959 São Paulo Biennale, entitled Nonfigurative South African Art, confirmed this trend. Paging through books and catalogs on postwar South African art, one is reminded of the large number of well-known artists who dabbled in abstraction from time to time or became leading proponents of abstract art. With the South African landscape having such a defined appeal, it is unsurprising that many artists should attempt to render it, albeit abstractly, but over time and in the hands of lesser talents, this approach resulted in a numbing painterly sameness or having nothing more than a veneer of abstraction. Suffice it to mention a few outstanding talents among this generation.

13

A survey exhibition of Coleman’s work was held at the Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery (SMAC) in Stellenbosch in 2014. See “Trevor Coleman: Abstraction 1960–1977,” http://www.smacgallery.com/exhibition/4289/. 14 Hannatjie van der Wat was honored with a retrospective exhibition at SMAC on the occasion of her 90th birthday in 2013. See “Hannatjie van der Wat: In Retro- a Seventy Year Career Survey 1943–2013,” http://www.smacgallery.com/ exhibition/hannatjie-van-der-wat-in-retro-10-may-13-july-2013/.



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Christo Coetzee’s (1929–2000) painting developed under the influence of Tachisme and Art Informel during the years 1956 to 1961 when he lived in Paris. His emphasis was on lyrical and expressive approaches to art making, coupled with spontaneity, pronounced gestural marks, and extravagant incorporations of found objects. As a prominent member of the French avant-garde led by artist Georges Mathieu and the critic Michel Tapié, Coetzee was one of South Africa’s earliest and best known artists internationally. In order to shock the South African public out of its complacency and flamboyantly expressing his individualistic vision of the role and purpose of art, he slashed all his canvases and painted over them at an exhibition held in Cape Town in 1975. Nel Erasmus (b. 1928) was enormously influential, both as a painter of meditative abstractions and as director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (1966–1977). She was the only South African artist featured in Michel Seuphor’s Abstract Painting: Fifty Years of Accomplishment, from Kandinsky to the Present (1964). Like Mancoba, Louis Khehla Maqhubela (b. 1939) developed an enduring love for the art of the African continent and wished for the cultural experiences of Africa and the West to come together. Still active, he sees abstraction as a means of incorporating his African heritage and his urban experiences in South Africa and abroad into drawings and paintings. In spite of a hostile environment created by the apartheid government, Maqhubela had success early in his career, selling his work and receiving commissions for paintings and mosaics. In 1966, he won first prize at the Adler Fielding Gallery’s annual Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition—not the prize for “native” artists and ahead of wellknown white artists—with a monumental mixed media on paper work, Peter’s Denial. The prize included a return air ticket to Europe. Maqhubela’s trip abroad, his exposure to European art and artists, and in particular the time he spent with ex-patriot Douglas Portway (1922– 1993) in Cornwall in the UK, offered him a means decisively to break out of the conventions and stylistic mannerisms of a genre that had been labeled “Township Art”—the depiction of everyday activities and the way of life in black urban environments created under apartheid. Maqhubela embraced a new direction, which meant the end of figurative expressionism and the beginning of a personal engagement with modernist abstraction, accompanied by the development of an artistic language and iconography inspired by his quest for spiritual growth. Typically untitled, the paintings are generally abstract, with floating shapes creating a feeling of boundlessness, while triangles, squares, and circles are mysteriously embedded in the ineffable hues and translucent



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paint. In Untitled (1972), a dark disk emerges from the painted surface, the oil is scratched and scraped to reveal under-painting and add texture; line configures and unifies. 15 Reflecting on the relationship between black artists and abstraction, particularly in the face of a market expectation that preferred figurative descriptions of township life, Maqhubela said: Even abstract art by a black practitioner was a declaration of war against being stereotyped, bearing in mind that abstraction has, for centuries, always been Africa’s premier form of expression. Why would our ancestral form of expression suddenly be deemed to be “foreign” to the black man of the 20th century? 16

Chiefly for political reasons, Maqhubela and his family left the country of their birth for Spain in 1973, settling in London three years later. 17 History will judge the final quality of Maqhubela’s work in the South African tradition, but in the meantime, the importance of the bridge that he created for artists living in the townships, away from prescriptive expressionism and into internationalist styles and concerns, can hardly be overestimated. Mention needs to be made of an exceptional project that occurred in 1984. Five years before Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Ricky Burnett—artist, curator and teacher—curated a ground-breaking exhibition, Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art. 18 It formed part of the BMW Kulturprogramm destined for a European tour and was also shown at Museum Africa in Johannesburg. Burnett presented the work of established white and black artists alongside that of black sculptors and bead artists from the rural areas who were hardly known at the time; figurative works in every possible medium alongside abstract paintings that spoke to viewers in another visual language. He summed up his broad and inclusive approach to the spirit of art making in South Africa at the time: 15 “Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart,” http://thenewchurch.co/exhibitions/thinkingfeeling-head-heart/. 16 Louis Khehla Maqhubela, personal communication with author, February 3, 2010. 17 Always keen to expand his knowledge and broaden his horizons, Maqhubela completed a year of study at Goldsmiths College (1984–85) before transferring to the Slade School of Art (1985–88), both in London. 18 The German title was Quellen und Strömungen: Eine Ausstellung Zeitgenössischer Südafrikanischer Kunst.



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We believe that we have unearthed some compelling images, revealed some intriguing parallels and re-affirmed the irrepressible energy of human creativity. South Africans cannot, and ought not, to lay claim to a common culture. But there is, we hope, in this collection a sense of a common humanity.19

South Africa was moving towards major political changes. The 1976 student uprising was followed in the 1980s by nationwide resistance to apartheid, States of Emergency20 and the cultural and academic boycott; 1990 marked the tail end of the struggle for political freedom, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the unbanning of the liberation movements. Abstract art began to fall out of favor. Socially engaged art was equated with figuration, while abstraction was viewed as rear guard. In 1990, I posed a question at a conference of the South African Association of Art Historians and the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland. My query, published in the journal De Arte the following year, was captured in the title: “Is There a Place for Black Abstract Painters in South Africa?” I expressed optimism for the possibilities of painterly abstraction in a post-1990, post-apartheid, post-struggle context—with a plea that it be given due consideration and that writers and curators support and engage with abstract art so that artists would be encouraged in their efforts to reinvent and broaden the language of abstraction. Abstract art was under aesthetic as well as political pressure and from the white academic and critical perspective, it was virtually forbidden for black artists. The fact that black artists felt differently did little to alter the prescriptive tone emanating from influential quarters in South African art and directed particularly at the Thupelo Workshop. The aims and history of the Thupelo Workshop are well documented;21 suffice it to note here that they had emerged from the Triangle Workshop, which had been launched by Anthony Caro and Robert Loder in New York in 1982 and attended by David Koloane (b. 1938) in 1983 and 1984. The South African initiative, driven by Koloane and Bill Ainslie, was presented 19

Ricky Burnett, Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art (Johannesburg: BMW South Africa), 1. 20 The apartheid regime under P.W. Botha used two States of Emergency in the 1980s to neutralize increasingly popular and often violent opposition. 21 The workshops moved to Cape Town in 1992 and became international in 2003. Year after year participants attest to the importance of the workshops, now held at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town and The Bag Factory in Johannesburg. See “Greatmore Studios,” http://www.greatmoreart.org.



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under the auspices of FUBA (Federated Union of Black Artists), Funda (derived from the Xhosa word “to learn”) and the Johannesburg Art Foundation.22 The focus was initially on abstract-expressionist modes of painting, but it was never an abstract-expressionist “movement.” The aims were to widen the scope of artists disadvantaged by apartheid by providing spaces, facilities, and materials—an environment for interaction and the opportunity of working freely on a large scale. The workshops promoted dialogue between artists on a nonracial basis, as well as a conscious crossfertilization of ideas. I recognized that the project could play a significant role in liberating artists from stylistic constraints and contribute to redefining black art making. Their initiative and activities drew much attention and derision. Charlene Smith (1986) wrote about a “simmering feud” and the “Americanization” of black artists (Weekly Mail, October/November), while Colin Richards (1987) accused the project of American imperialist influences (Weekly Mail, October). Gavin Younge complained that the workshops were not held in the townships, but in Broederstroom (a white farming district) and that the artists’ expenses were paid. He also questioned the relevance of abstraction “in the light of the international reassessment of figuration.”23 Black voices were equally vocal. As part of the ongoing debate, Bongiwe Dhlomo–Mautloa (b. 1956) wrote (Weekly Mail, October/November): It would appear that white South African artists aren’t necessarily expected to carry the burden of apartheid guilt in their works, or even dig into their Dutch or English colonial roots for inspiration. But black artists, as the political situation gets fiercer, are expected to carry the banner for the liberation struggle in one hand while holding on to the goat-hide skin of their ancestral roots in the other.

I was concerned about the emergence of a kind of cultural apartheid and the erosion of the freedom of artists to express themselves in the manner and medium of their choice; content, political involvement, 22 The Johannesburg Art Foundation, run by Bill and Fieke Ainslie, offered a place and space outside of formal university structures for artists—Ricky Burnett, William Kentridge, Jenny Stadler, and Jill Trappler, among others, all worked with Ainslie at some time or another. 23 Gavin Younge, Art of the South African Townships (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 70.



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“authentic” African imagery and figuration were demanded. The purpose of the article and the conference papers was to suggest an open field for discourse—for black art in general and abstraction in particular—and to challenge prevailing attitudes. William Kentridge (b. 1955) expressed similar concerns in 1990: I think that there has been a tendency in South Africa of recent to pay particular attention to certain forms of image making over others and that there has been a predilection for work which is allegorical . . . there is a sort of tyranny of allegories which exists at the moment or which has existed recently in South Africa which certainly needs to be reconsidered.24

A major part of my 1990 article focused on the artists mentored at the Thupelo Workshop: Bongiwe Dhlomo–Mautloa, Garth Erasmus (b. 1956), Sfiso Ka Mkame (b. 1963), Billy Mandindi (1967–2005), Kagiso Pat Mautloa (b. 1952), Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955), Toni Nkotsi (b. 1955), Mmapula Mmakgoba Helen Sebidi (b. 1943), and Durant Sihlali (1935– 2004), to name a few. That they were harbingers of things to come has been amply illustrated since the first workshops, as they have all made their mark—as artists, curators, and teachers. In retrospect, Ricky Burnett commented on the controversy that initially accompanied the workshops: I’ve never really understood what the fuss was in this country, particularly, about abstraction. How it was seen by a certain generation of academics at Wits, for example, as an expression of neo-American colonial expansionism—that somehow the CIA were funding projects that Bill Ainslie and others were involved in. It all seemed strangely adolescent to me. On a formal level, anything that makes an image work is the same for a photograph as it is for an abstract painting. I think one of the things that is really interesting for me in terms of the history of this country is that when people like David Koloane, Kagiso Pat Mautloa, Sam Nhlengethwa, Helen Sebidi, Tony Nkotsi and many others were introduced to abstraction, they grew as human beings. They were introduced not to a parochial culture, but to a global sense of something bigger, something broader, something adventurous.25

24

Speech delivered on the occasion of the opening of Jill Trappler’s exhibition at Gallery International in Cape Town in May 1990. 25 Sean O’Toole, “Freeing the Image,” Art South Africa 8, no. 4 (2010), 76.



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Figure 12.1. David Koloane, Commuters, 2008. Drypoint etching, edition 25.4 x 50 cm. Courtesy of David Krut Projects.

It is important to note that, while socially engaged art in South Africa was—and still is—equated with figuration, abstract art is not necessarily politically neutral; on the contrary, it has given rise to some powerfully political works, starting with David Koloane, who declared in 1990 (New Nation, September): “In my work, I reflect a spectrum of concerns in the urban communities. The only thing I do not do is illustrate it like a comic book.” Koloane’s abstract-expressionist roots underpin his current observations and depictions of South African society.26 (Fig. 12.1) Unsurprisingly, reputations waned as the pendulum swung from abstraction to figuration, prompting some artists to change direction, while others persisted and became stalwarts in the history of abstraction in South 26

In 2013 the stalwarts of painterly abstraction: Koloane, Burnett, Jenny Stadler, and Gail Berman showed together at Gallery2 in Johannesburg, in an exhibition titled Thinking in Paint.



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African art. Bill Ainslie was one of the most influential teachers of artists—abstract and figurative, socially aware and politically engaged. He believed that every person had within him or her the capacity for creative expression. The emphasis in his paintings was on plasticity and expression rather than on narrative, drawing the spectator into the work, into surfaces that advance and recede, not in an optically illusionistic manner and not through predictable devices, but through the sheer intensity and physicality of the work. Ricky Burnett has a long-term commitment to abstraction, based in the tenet of “freeing the image,” but he is also aware of the pitfalls, as expressed in an interview in Art South Africa: Practice becomes a way of knowing and hopefully through an open-ended practice you start to discover new stuff. Now, the downside to that is often . . . it becomes a credo in its own terms. It never ends, because you can never find the god at the end of the splash—just the splash. One can get caught in the same cycle of deluding yourself that you are working towards openness when in fact you are trapped in a cycle of doubt. It was certainly tough for me. I got myself to the point where as soon as I became confident with something I felt the need to destroy it.27

Over the years Burnett has succeeded in freeing the image in many different ways; for his 2015 exhibition, Troubled by Goya, he meticulously copied Francisco Goya’s prints only to overlay them with palpable pigment and dense tones that evoke the visual and emotional darkness of Goya’s series of prints Los Disparates (c. 1816–1823).28 Kevin Atkinson was a powerful and inspirational force in South African art, as a controversial artistic personality and academic. Although better known as a painter and printmaker, he experimented with sculpture, installation, land art, and performance art. He embraced a vast range of approaches to painting, moving from geometric abstractions in the 1960s (Plate 12.2), through the severe yet sensuous contrasts between geometric and organic form in the 1970s, to the forcefully expressionistic gestural works of the 1980s. He understood that the tensions and conflicts in apartheid South Africa could be captured and communicated through violent, colliding, painterly lines, brushstrokes, and splashes of strong color. A witty and incisive voice, Atkinson tried to address complex issues, ranging from the attitudes of American and European expressionist 27

O’Toole, “Freeing the Image,” 76. “When Feelings Associate a Consciousness Forms,” 2016, https://www.google.co.za/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ricky+burnett+troubled+by+goya. 28



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movements to writings on language, semiotics, phenomenology, and philosophy.29 He translated psychic energies into the visual language of a painted or drawn surface and remained an abstractionist and intermittent conceptualist till the end.30 In the 1980s, Jenny Stadler (b. 1938) started deconstructing modernism, while at the same time bringing about reconciliation between a modernist concern with materials and process and postmodern strategies of reference and textuality. Stadler’s signature language—the organization and abstract articulation of the picture plane, as well as the soft-edge geometric shapes and grids that conceal and reveal collaged drawings, found images, and a multitude of textures and patterns—has not changed. Her densely layered works remain abstracted from life experiences and inspired by the African landscape and objects, Oriental textiles, ancient and contemporary art worldwide, while at the same time affirming that abstraction has continuing viability as a carrier of contemporary spirituality and lyricism. Jill Trappler (b. 1957) has consistently practiced painterly abstraction and her œuvre reveals the astonishing variety and quality that can be achieved. Influenced by Bill Ainslie, she is a leading figure in the Thupelo Workshops. She insists that she does not “abstract” from anything—hers is an art of poetry and metaphor and associations that can emerge years after the visual stimulus registered; these are never literal, but contained and communicated in different media. Her references to music, melody, and lyrics echo Wassily Kandinsky’s belief that art comes from within and that colors and shapes can speak to people just as music does. Karel Nel (b. 1955), artist, academic, curator and collector, has occupied a special place in the trajectory of abstraction since his first show in Johannesburg in 1980. His is a personal journey that ignores trends and that explores the mechanisms of perception, including that of the “mind’s eye.” For more than thirty years his works have revealed the complex and subtle interface of the inner and outer worlds, of scientific sources and physical, intellectual, and spiritual peregrinations; of objects collected and their symbolic connotations. 29

These can be found in The Yearbook of the Staff of the Michaelis School of Fine Art (Cape Town: University of Cape Town), published occasionally. 30 Opening “Plato’s Cave:” The Legacy of Kevin Atkinson (1939–2007) opened at the Iziko South African National Gallery on September 10, 2013 and ran through to February 14, 2014. Drawn from Atkinson’s underground studio named “Plato’s Cave,” the exhibition was both a posthumous tribute and an attempt to come to a greater understanding of the impressive contribution that he made to South African art, both as an artist and an educator.



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In a series of works entitled Status of Dust (2003) he used samples of earth—colored ochres valued as primal pigments, earth taken from sites such as Hiroshima and Ground Zero, which represent moments of shifts in human consciousness.31Potent Fields (2002), for example, comprises two squares of red and white ochre harvested from close to the village in the Eastern Cape where Nelson Mandela was born.32 As artist-in-residence to the COSMOS Project, in which an international team of astrophysicists are mapping two square degrees of the universe, Nel has translated the ideas and images to which he has been exposed in works using 540-million year-old carboniferous dust and salt (Composing Darkness, 2008) and in drawings such as Stacked Coda (2008) (Fig. 12.2). Concepts that border on unimaginable notions of infinity become palpable. The role of dealers, collectors, curators, writers, and publishers is worthy of consideration. In 2003, the Dimension Data Collection was installed in their Johannesburg offices. Put together by gallerist Michael Stevenson, the title Moving in Time and Space: Shifts Between Abstraction and Representation in Postwar South African Art, captured the essence of the project, as well as shifts in the artistic climate that may “explain” why certain art practices go out of fashion, but not why they are absent from public collections, art historical anthologies, and exhibition surveys. Stevenson’s essay “Aspects of Abstraction in South African Art History” offers a wealth of information and references to documentation about a time and approaches to art making that remain under-researched and unpublished.33 He documented the tensions and typical responses of the public and critics to the new and unfamiliar, which often goes hand in hand with unthinking subservience to the dictates of fashion; at the same time it breeds intolerance and the concomitant marginalization of everything that does not fit. When the taste for abstract art was finally established, all other art was regarded as old-fashioned if not reactionary.

31

“Karel Nel: Status of Dust,” http://www.studiointernational.com/ index.php/ karel-nel-status-of-dust. 32 Karel Nel, Potent Fields, http://www.artfirst.co.uk/karel_nel/nel_potentfields.html. 33 Michael Stevenson, “Aspects of Abstraction in South African Art History,” in Michael Stevenson and Annabel Rosholt, Moving in Time and Space: Shifts Between Abstraction and Representation in Post-war South African Art (Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Contemporary, 2003).



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Figure 12.2. Karel Nel. Stacked Coda, 2008. Pastel and sprayed pigment on bonded fiber–fabric, 250 x 80 cm. Copyright Karel Nel.



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A publication on contemporary South African art, 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, 34 offered interesting, if predictable, insights into the place of abstraction: of the one-hundred artists featured in the book, few work in an abstract mode and those who do, are black and were selected by black writers. David Koloane wrote about Garth Erasmus, Kagiso Pat Mautloa, and Samson Mnisi (b. 1971); Moleleki Frank Ledimo (b. 1962) wrote about David Koloane; Sipho Mdanda wrote about Durant Sihlali and Dinkies Sithole (1970–2009); Tumelo Mosaka about Thabiso Phokompe (b. 1970). White writers were seemingly disinterested in abstract art, although no longer overtly critical. Sue Williamson’s book, South African Art Now,35 covers forty years of aesthetic production in South Africa; it documents and analyzes the work of almost one hundred artists, but there is not a single abstract painting to be seen. Koloane and Sam Nhlengethwa are among the artists, but their work is figurative. She features abstract sculpture by Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953) and Paul Edmunds (b. 1970), while semi-abstract works by Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975) and Moshekwa Langa (b. 1975) are included with their figurative sculpture and paintings respectively. Any novice learning about contemporary South African art, or international curators relying on these publications, would have huge gaps in their understanding of what is happening in the country. Furthermore, they exacerbate the exclusionary practices that are only too widespread. There are exceptions. The Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907 to 200736 comprises four volumes, arranged chronologically, while the art is approached thematically. Numerous publications about South African art have appeared since the 1990s, but nobody had attempted to produce a comprehensive account from a post-apartheid perspective and in the context of national and international art practice and art history. Many articles deal with the bruised places and psyches of apartheid and artists neglected in the past, but space was made available for a chapter on Formalism in twentieth-century South African art.37

34

Sophie Perryer, ed., 10 years 100 artists. Art in a Democratic South Africa (Cape Town: Bell–Roberts Publishing, 2004). 35 Sue Williamson, South African Art Now (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 36 Jillian Carman, ed., Visual Century South African Art in Context (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011). 37 Hayden Proud, “Formalism in Twentieth-century South African Art,” in Visual Century South African Art in Context, ed. Lize van Robbroeck (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 164–187.



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Since opening in 2006, the Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary (SMAC) Art Gallery has presented many review exhibitions and retrospectives focusing on historical and contemporary South African abstraction. The three volumes Abstract Art from the Isolation Years (2007, 2008, and 2009) 38 and catalogs on individual artists, have contributed substantially to the documentation and revision of a period of South African art history. Alert to the current resurgence of abstract art internationally and locally, an exhibition entitled Back to the Future— Abstract Art in South Africa Past and Present, opened in October 2013. It tracked the interesting shifts and developments in recent years, as a younger generation is increasingly drawn to abstraction. In 2014, I was invited to curate an exhibition from abstract works in The New Church Museum (TNCM) collection. 39 Entitled Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart after a painting by Kevin Atkinson, it mapped affinities and connections that emerge between particular works and juxtaposed the work of the precursors of modernism in the company of full-blown modernists and the “re-modernism” 40 (to use Terry Smith’s term) of some members of the new generation. A number of artists discussed above and below were represented. In preparation for the exhibition and the catalog essay, I turned to an article I wrote for Art South Africa magazine in 2008.41 Painting itself had become unfashionable and had been eclipsed by lens-based media; I could

38

Renzske Sholtz, ed., Abstract South African Art From the Isolation Years, vol. 1 (Stellenbosch: SMAC Publishing, 2007); Marelize van Zyl, ed., Abstract South African Art From the Isolation Years, vol. 2 (Stellenbosch: SMAC Publishing, 2008) and Marelize van Zyl, ed., Abstract South African Art From the Isolation Years, vol. 3 (Stellenbosch: SMAC Publishing, 2009). 39 This is South Africa’s first private art museum that opened in December 2012 to house and display the collection started by Piet Viljoen in 1998. There are three main areas that guide acquisitions: abstract, conceptual, and socio-political art. See “The New Church Museum,” http://www.thenewchurch.co and “Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart,” http://thenewchurch.co/exhibitions/thinking-feeling-headheart/ (as copyright holder of the text in the catalog, I have drawn on recent research conducted for the exhibition and catalog). 40 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 7. 41 In 2008, I was invited by the editor of Art South Africa to reflect on my 1991 article and to take stock of the situation then. See Marilyn Martin, “At the Threshold of Seeing,” Art South Africa 8, no. 2 (2008), 68–79. The present article represents to some extent an update of these reflections.



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refer to only a few contemporary artists and concluded that little was happening: If painterly abstraction is to get a new lease on life it will have to be rescued from interior design and the anodyne repetitiveness that killed it in the 1980s. It has to be revitalised and contemporised by its practitioners, who would do well to learn the lessons of the past.42

Change was in the air and some South African artists were beginning to show that there were many ways of arriving at abstraction, both technically and conceptually. At first glance, Georgina Gratrix’s (b. 1982) Olympia (Stripe Painting) (2008), appears to be in line with modernist hard-edge geometric abstraction, but the differences are profound. In her Women Wallpaper Series (2008), Gratrix reduced three great paintings to a series of stripes in order to explore myths of representation, the flatness and integrity of the picture surface, and the unassailable genius of the artists and their masterpieces: Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and Willem de Kooning’s Woman V (1952–53). The size and medium of the works are respected and the colors are “true” if deconstructed, but the subjects are no more.43 In my article I described Jan-Henri Booyens’ (b. 1980) first solo show, 44 The Matt Sparkle, as “unabashedly modernist in intention and execution” and noted that his reliance on intuition rather than a predetermined outcome was reminiscent of the modus operandi of many abstract painters of the past. 45 Booyens offers a fascinating and vibrant take on contemporary abstract painting, in some works harking back to, and critically engaging with, the approaches of the 1960s and 1970s, in others combining painterly brush strokes with hard-edged lines, floating shapes with prominent calligraphic marks, or introducing heavy impasto. He challenges the two-dimensionality of the surface, thereby creating dynamic visual and spatial tensions.

42

Martin, “At the Threshold of Seeing,” 77. “Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart,” http://thenewchurch.co/exhibitions/thinkingfeeling-head-heart/. 44 Whatiftheworld/Gallery in Cape Town at the end of 2008. Booyens exhibits regularly at Blank Projects in Cape Town. 45 Martin, “At the Threshold of Seeing,” 75. 43



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Figure 12.3. Jan-Henri Booyens. Joseph Beuys is ’n Leuenaar, 2014. Oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm. The New Church Museum, Cape Town.

Booyens’ interest in both the physical and social landscape of South Africa finds expression in titles such as RDP (2008), Strip Mine (2012), and Verander Gestrand Oppad Teerpad (2013). He also delves into art history (Joseph Beuys is ’n Leuenaar, 2014) (Fig. 12.3), the intangible, and the very nature of being (Die aard van wese, 2014).46 Zander Blom’s (b. 1982) artistic activity started in 2004 via an intensive analysis of American and European art history and an interest in old art books. Drawn to the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, his focus shifted from photography to painting in oils. He clearly delighted in the act of painting, but any unconscious impulse was denied 46

RDP stands for the “Reconstruction and Development Programme” initiated by the African National Congress government after 1994; one of its outcomes is the soulless, poorly designed and constructed mass housing, commonly referred to as “RDP houses.” Verander Gestrand Oppad Teerpad translates as Change Stranded On-the-way Tar road, Joseph Beuys is a leuenaar translates as Joseph Beuys is a liar and Die aard van wese as The nature of being.



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by ruler-drawn, straight lines that implied control—optical illusion was contradicted by violent marks and stains lying firmly on top of the picture surface. His reverence for the modern masters was tempered by his Avant Car Guard:47 Frank Stella’s hard-edged semi-circular construction, Hatra II (1968) disturbed with tendrils of black paint or a Malevich-like black sphere suspended in a blank space by three graphite lines—balanced and perfect. More recently, Blom applies thick blobs of white paint or brightly colored shapes onto raw linen canvases, allowing the resultant stains to form part of the pattern; the works are untitled and numbered.48 Raw canvas also supports some of Maja Marx’s work shown under the title Block in 2013. Black moleskin notebooks were depicted face down, closed but not quite—some of the elastic bands that secure them had slipped, revealing tantalizing glimpses of white paper, as in Black Block (2013). Visually these works are rich and evocative; on other levels they hold secrets, withhold truths, or disguise acts of censure. In the Cross Series (2013), notes by important thinkers are crossed or blocked out with marks that are as meaningful in their own right as the words that disappear in the act of painting.49 Clive van den Berg (b. 1956) won the Volkskas Atelier Young Artists award in 1987 with a landscape painting; he went on to explore themes of the body, Eros, memory, land, and light in painting, printmaking, multimedia sculpture, landscape installation, and videography. In 2013 he returned to the most venerated yet contested genre in South African art— landscape painting, with an exhibition Land Throws Up a Ghost. Both the surface and underground of a mined land, source of untold wealth and suffering, were layered symbolically and literally with a myriad of marks and shapes, taking the viewer with him into the haunted spaces. Tensions between figuration and abstraction manifested in the presence of straight lines, a bird, and figures disintegrating in showers of bright color. Mining was also the theme of Mary Wafer’s (b. 1975) work shown in 2013. Mine comprised a series of paintings and drawings that spoke of her desire to respond to a tragic event at Lonmin platinum mine in the Marikana area, North West Province, in August 2012. A strike led to 47

For more on this collective, see: “Avant Car Guard,” http://www.avantcarguard.blogspot.com/, accessed January 31, 2015, and “Avant Car Guard,” http://stevenson.info/exhibitionsbs/acg/index.htm. 48 “Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart,” http://thenewchurch.co/exhibitions/thinkingfeeling-head-heart/. 49 “Maja Marx Block: Recent works,” http://www.whatiftheworld.com/exhibition/ block-recent-works-by-maja-marx/.



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violent confrontations involving the police, security, trade union leaders, and miners; thirty-four miners died and many were injured. Wafer partially abstracted the landscape and crowds from visits to the site and from media images. She captured “the particularities of the environment; the harsh light, the broken and dislocated tracts of wasted land, the detritus or discarded remains of an extractive exploitation of both nature and humanity” in a virtually monochrome palette.50 Some artists employ unusual materials and sophisticated technology to arrive at contemporary forms of abstraction. Siemon Allen’s (b. 1970) The Birds (2006) was hand woven from recycled strands of a 16mm rare copy of Hitchcock’s film of the same name (1962). Faded to a reddish hue, the film stills become frames in a grid construction that speaks in the language of painting. 51 In a 2009 exhibition, Thomas Mulcaire (b. 1971) used a range of technologies to replicate the picture plane, and to create vast canvases that appear to be meticulous hard-edge paintings, but that were in fact digitally produced and evenly coated with saturated Ultrachrome ink. Liberty Battson (b. 1990) won the 2014 ABSA Atelier Art Competition with Odds of an Artist Like Me, a diptych created by using 2K automotive paint that acts as a bar graph. Each stripe stands for the statistics related to artists, some of which were trivial, others more serious.52 Dan Halter (b. 1977) gives new inflections to geometry and welldefined edges in his inkjet prints. Fabrication 3 (Plate 12.3) has its origins in the Chinese-made plastic-weave bags that have come to symbolize immigrants and refugees in Africa. In 2010, while on a residency in Scotland, Halter approached Johnstons of Elgin, a well-known manufacturer of tartan, to translate the weave into a high-end tartan fabric, which he has described as “refugee or immigrant tartan.”53 Like Halter, Burundian Serge Alain Nitegeka (b. 1974) is a migrant and immigrant. He explores and unites painting, sculpture, and architecture and his 2015 monumental, meandering interventions in the Stevenson Cape Town under the title Black Passage, evoked both El Lissitsky’s Proun Room of 1923 and Mondrian’s palette.54 50 “Mary Wafer Mine,” http://davidkrutprojects.com/exhibitions/2013-4-5_marywafer_proj-js. 51 “Siemon Allen,” http://www.siemonallen.org/project_pages/weaves.html. 52 “Artist Profile—Liberty Battson” (blog), http://www.ellerman.co.za/blog/artistprofile-liberty-battson/, accessed January 13, 2016. 53 The middle panel is woven from a combination of the two outer panels. See “Dan Halter,” http://www.danhalter.com/author/dan-halter/. 54 See Serge Alain Nitegeka’s art dealer’s website, http://www.stevenson.info/artists/nitegeka.html.



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Without the pressures of making and promoting politically correct or “relevant” art, the rest of the world did not turn against abstraction as decisively as South Africans did in the 1990s. Here the artists who persisted in remaining abstractionists and who relished the ambiguities and complexities that arise from blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration were brave, for they risked being overlooked for major national and international exhibitions, and remained or became missing persons in the history of South African art. However, there is a profound paradigm shift—twenty years after the first democratic elections, artists are embracing another kind of liberation, without necessarily being either apolitical or disinterested in the many challenges that face the country. Abstract art in South Africa remains suffused with its own poetry or polemics and rethinking abstraction in South Africa is timely. A number of questions arise. What might the current swing of the pendulum mean in and for art in the country? Painting in general and abstraction in particular are being reconsidered and reinterpreted by longstanding practitioners, as well as a post-apartheid generation, and in the wake of this resurgence follow exhibitions and articles. An abstraction that is living and of its time is crucial, for the danger of many jumping on the bandwagon—artists, curators, collectors—in an unthinking and opportunistic way already lurks in this moment of excitement and promise. Avant Car Guard, the visual art collective that critiqued and ridiculed the art world and its institutions, disbanded in 2012, its members Jan-Henri Booyens, Zander Blom, and Michael MacGarry (b. 1978) having been wholly taken in and up by the commercial gallery system. It has not gone unnoticed.55 Will South African artists continue to expand the parameters of the genre and show that there are many and exciting ways of arriving at abstraction in the twenty-first century, or will a veneer of abstraction settle in, again? Are we witnessing radical transformation or a rehearsal and a retread of art history that will serve to feed personal ambition and a voracious art market? Time will tell.

55

See Mary Corrigal, “Itinerant Studio No. 33” (blog), http://leaderlesssystems.blogspot.com/, accessed December 21, 2015 and “Kant’s Blom and Wallpaper,” http://www.artthrob.co.za/Reviews/M_Blackman_reviews_ New-Paintings_byZander_Blom_at_STEVENSON_in_Cape_Town.aspx.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN WHAT IS THE ROLE OF ABSTRACTION WITHIN THE CONCERNS OF VISUAL ART LANGUAGE CONTEMPORANEOUSLY? WENDY KELLY

With its emphasis on the figurative, the narrative and allegorical referencing, postmodernism has by its very nature challenged abstraction. In some circles, postmodernisms’ condemnation of modernist/formalist influences as being narrow and limited has formed the basis of the continuous theoretical negative positioning of abstraction as a credible visual language. Predicated by abstraction’s inextricable involvement with the theories of modernism, particularly the heavily debated Greenbergian formalism, Pincus–Witten states: “The academy of abstraction became The Enemy and the activities covered by postmodernism emerged.”1 Thus concept of postmodernism as a style, movement, or philosophy has had major impact upon all forms of abstraction. Stephen Bann feels this came about because of a “wish to bracket off the modern phase, so to speak, and to extract it from the flux of history.” 2 Also, there is a perception that abstraction in many ways is in conflict with the everyday. It lacks the representational and does not involve a narrative, both concerns being part of postmodernism’s tenet. As a result, abstraction has been marginalized, particularly in more conservative areas; however, it is still being explored on a broad and interpretive basis. It could even be said that postmodern questioning, together with the subsequent questioning of postmodernism, has created some benefits for abstraction in that it has loosened the perceived straight 1 Robert Pincus Witten, Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art 1966– 1986 (Ann Arbor, MICH: UMI Research Press, 1987), 9. 2 Stephen Bann, Ways Around Modernism, Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts; 2 (London: Routledge, 2007), 36.

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jacket of modernism with its rigid lineal categorization of trends and movements. It is my feeling that the complexity of contemporary approaches within abstraction is a result of postmodernism’s questioning. Everything is open to interpretation; there are no movements as such. Stylistic interpretations range from the gestural to the geometric and back to the gesture, often by the same artist. Materials are skilfully adapted and re-occur in many guises. The range of inventive approaches within self imposed limitations or systems, material manipulation, complex processes, and development in series are issues that seem to unite the various approaches to abstraction. In this paper, attention will be drawn to how abstraction is being addressed contemporaneously, with examples of approaches taken by artists together with how their work is being interpreted. My comments will concentrate primarily on nonobjective/nonfigurative/nonmimetic abstraction as against the idea of the abstracted image, and my concern is centered on the two dimensional, that being painting and works on paper. My interest in the problems within this area is more than academic. I am a practicing artist and for the past twenty odd years have been developing and honing my own abstract visual language. I am, therefore, inextricably aware of the swings, shifts, philosophical debates, and questioning, and the periods of acceptance and of marginalization that the genre has experienced. I will be looking at the developments from an Australian perspective by referring to artists that either have exhibited works in Australia, or reside there. In the main, the concerns of Australian artists run parallel to global trends, but their position is perhaps more tenuously placed due to issues such as a smaller population base, political shifts, and the presence of what has been a well-supported indigenous market.3 During the past one hundred years, abstraction has adapted its raison d’être to prevailing ideologies. Over what I term as the first three generations of abstraction, in a chameleon like fashion, it has shifted its concerns and has adapted to the complexities of the times. Each generation of Western abstraction differs greatly from the other, but are interrelated in that their influences were often interpretations of the radical, the reactionary, the challenging, or the rebelling against the evolutionary processes inherent within the era. Political traumas, upheavals, and situations such as wars and depressions, deeply affected the philosophies 3

Recent changes to rulings concerning the ownership of artworks by Australian Superannuation Funds has affected the market for all art, particularly indigenous art.



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of the times, and in turn influenced artists and their output. As time passed, the raison d’être of the previous generations approach to the genre were questioned and adapted. Briefly stated, the quest for a utopian ideology of the first generation of abstractionists in the early years of the twentieth century became a hollow promise after World War I, as did the belief in the cosmos or an occult based striving for the concept of a form of spiritual purity. In the second generation, abstraction informed the modernist/formalist revolutionary stance of abstract expressionism with its striving towards rebellion and desire for a purity of an expressive emotion. The concept of purity was reinterpreted and, through the inventive use of newly developed materials, there came a belief that painting’s only relevant concern was the abstract disposition of line, color, shape, and space on a flat surface. In the third generation, abstract expressionism’s “revolution” was considered as either politically incorrect or too conventional in nature. Minimalist artists took the desire for purity as far as they could. It is from this point that abstraction reinvented itself yet again as concept became subject, and within that came the development of further interpretations of materiality. To quote Eleanor Heartney, “Then along came postmodernism,” and abstraction was espoused as having no viable future because of its past influences. 4 Postmodernist referencing and emphasis on narrative/ allegorical/figurative concerns affected the reading of all forms of modernism’s abstraction. Rhetoric became so vehement that in some circles it was felt that abstraction had outlived its relevance—again. In turn, postmodernism’s philosophies have been questioned. Bann feels that although not to be dismissed as a past or irrelevant philosophy, postmodernism lacks “a dialectical relationship to the past that would take into account the multiple determinations to which modernism itself was an heir,” 5 or to put it another way, postmodernism lacks the history and reason of modernism. Postmodernism has altered the way abstraction has been approached, and that brings us to what I consider as the fourth generation of abstraction, that being interpretations of abstraction occurring now. In the twenty-first century many are exploring the genre, and with more complex approaches, despite the postmodernist perceived theoretical blanket downgrading and marginalizing of modernism. The work that is being produced now, for all of the difficulties, has become more broadly interpreted, sophisticated, and eclectic. 4 5



Eleanor Heartney, Art & Today (London: Phaidon Press, 2008), 67. Bann, Ways Around Modernism, 36.

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Despite this, there is much insecurity felt by both the artists and their audience. During the process of gaining permission from artists whose work I felt would fit in with this discussion, two artists from the one Australian commercial gallery refused permission. The gallerist’s communication intimated that both artists Ph.D.’s clearly separated them from postmodernism and historic links with abstraction. Clearly, these artists (and their gallerist) felt the need to distance themselves from any perceived reference to modernist or postmodernist theory. On the other hand, Dr. Billy Gruner stated that he would prefer “to be described as post formalist, engaging in a generic aesthetic response linked to the history of abstraction, reductive art, and more specifically nonobjective art.”6 The fact that in some places abstraction is not being considered part of the main stream of current art concerns has a consequence that continued exploration of the abstract/nonobjective can be considered as an alternative practice. A Melbourne gallerist7 once patiently explained to me that abstraction was a select and niche market, and to quote Jeremy Gilbert-Ralph in Ryan: “Abstraction develops in a subterranean sort of way.”8 Sydney’s Non-objective Contemporary Art Space (SNO) and Factory 49 are two artist-run spaces in Sydney that have adopted the exhibiting of nonfigurative/nonobjective abstraction as their mission. These spaces are situated in suburban south Sydney, well away from the main stream of galleries. A like-minded group of passionate, energetic, and informed people, consisting of artists, academics, and supporters, have a broad network of connecting affiliations in Europe and America, particularly in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and France, as well as across Australia9. As an example, Richard van der Aa10 was co-director of the unfortunately now closed (2014) ParisCONCRET and has regularly shown 6

Billy Gruner, personal communication with the author, April 2012. Interview with Charles Nodrum, Director, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, April 2012. 8 David Ryan, Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twenty Contemporary Painters (London: Routledge, 2002), 2. 9 Some but by no means all of the artist run initiatives and galleries in this network are: AC4CA, CCNOA, L’Espace de L’Art Concret, Factory 49, GKG, H29, Haus Konstruktiv, Hebel 121, IS Projects, Minus Space, MKK, Museum Kulturspiecher, Non Objective SUD, ParisCONCRET, Perceptual observer and Reductive Painting (Web Sites), Project Initiative Tilburg, PS, Raum 2810, Sydney Non-objective Artists Space, and Transit Abstract. 10 Richard van der Aa’s website, http://www.richardvanderaa.com. 7



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work at Factory 49 and SNO, and Pam Aitken11 of Factory 49, Sydney, regularly showed at ParisCONCRET. With artists being able to see each other’s work, this valuable support system and intercommunication forms a strong center for discussion, criticism, and debate. Personal motivations vary as broadly as the outcomes. When artists who are working in a nonobjective abstract field are asked why they continue to do so within the current climate, they reply with a complex base of reasons. The most recurring are: One, its viability as a visual language, Two, its ability to communicate in a nonnarrative way, Three, an intrigue with the role of series, materiality, and the process of making, Four, a desire to liberate themselves from the perceived imitations of the figurative and Five, as a form of escapism from a narrative or storytelling image consumption and the abundance of imagery that surrounds us. These reasons distil to give us an idea of the concerns of abstraction contemporaneously. The results are impossibly plural, and endlessly diverse. Abstract artists are enthusiastic, informed and passionate, and have an energetic sense of vitality. As expressed by Cheetham, “what is most compelling and fascinating about the recent history of abstraction is its vitality in the failed narrative of purity. Abstraction is an infection that will not go away.”12 Many artists choose traditional mediums and methods, whilst others have embraced alternative expression such as technology or digital media. However, regardless of chosen method and media, the eclectic breadth of approach is staggeringly broad. There are, however, some trends that appear to be constant. Within their practice, artists seem to need to control certain basic elements. Together with their personal motivations, artists seem to set themselves self imposed rules, limits, or systems. This is demonstrated through the production of repetitious work in serial form that develops a basic premise or process. As examples, it can be within a strict grid structure, an adapted 11

“Small Gestures of Exultation: Part II,” interview by Amarie Bergman with Pam Aitken, Whitehot Magazine (online), http://www.whitehotmagazine.com/articles/ in-conversation-with-pam-aitken/2802 12 Mark A. Cheetham, Abstract Art against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance and Cure since the 60s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21.



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grid structure, or without a grid and use a process of gestural balances. They can use masking tape, blades, or inert pigments, blend, pour, spray, or brush the paint, all within the limits of the original concept or intent. By working in series and incorporating complex processes, artists tend to develop their visual language through medium, method, and material experimentation. In the majority of cases, the end result is that the completed work reflects upon the conditions of making of the work within the artist’s set of designated controls. Tony Godfrey in his book Painting Today, divides his approach to abstraction into two sections, pure abstraction and ambiguous abstraction.13 In order to indicate the breadth of the topic, I would like to delve more deeply to review current approaches to nonobjective/nonfigurative abstraction.

The abstract and the object Just as there has been an interest in abstracting objects, there are also artists interested in the development of combining figurative elements with the abstract concept. Nickas refers to this as being a “hybrid” approach that has led to the questioning of the “purity” of both genres, and draws attention to the abstract quality of figuration by forcing the question of whether a work can be interpreted as figurative or abstract genre.14 Artists such as Gerhard Richter15 and Ross Bleckner16 work within this system. Jon Cattapan uses Photoshop to cut and paste, after which he incorporates complex processes to slowly build his surfaces. 17 His interest is in the exploration or navigation of the urban condition, and his work fits within the area where something that is figurative is manipulated and placed within an abstracted ground. At this point, I would like to refer to an Australian “art movement.” I will not delve too deeply into the issue here because it is a subject that is very complex and incorporates deeply emotive issues. Within the confines of my discussion, it is my contention that the art of the indigenous of Australia sits within the area of the abstracted image or a hybrid of figure/ground abstraction. It could not be construed as nonobjective or 13

Tony Godfrey, Painting Today (Phaidon: Oxford, 2009). B. O. B. Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (Phaidon: Oxford, 2009), 11. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 Ibid., 11. 17 Jon Cattapan’s website, http://www.joncattapan.com.au. 14



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nonfigurative. The work is about tribal laws, myths, and taboos, and has a story to tell of indigenous culture and country. The “movement” as such has had a great deal of support. The Aboriginal Arts Board within the Australia Council for the Arts is well funded. Also with the early Papunya Tula developments, it was not the artists who were market savvy; the assistance of nonindigenous supporters was needed. Some of the support was altruistic, and some not. Currently, many remote indigenous artists are assisted with materials and marketing by funded community arts centers, such as at the Fitzroy Crossing Centre. Interestingly, most of what is written on Aboriginal Art is couched in terms of the need to emphasize the legitimacy of the work being contemporary art and not anthropological.18

Digital influences Working with the invention of constructed forms, Gordon Monro’s specifically designed digital programs manipulate an evolving imagery that changes and develops from an invented and artificial DNA. 19 The results are either displayed on screen or as digital prints. Both he and William Latham 20 develop generic algorithms that form evolutionary “drawings” or organizational concepts for evolving new appearances of visual digitized life forms.21 These artists are engaged in involving digital technology as a means of developing their visual expressive language. Using digital media to reduce the data of photography of city buildings, Paul Snell mounts his large richly colorful vertical striped images behind slick thick Perspex,22 and David Harley’s abstract images are developed to become huge photographic sheets of pigmented ink on poly pop paper.23 These sheets can be printed to fit the dimensions of a wall and have an immersive quality, much like wallpaper. This has the result of moving abstraction towards installation. 18

For further information on this subject, see Dr. Andrew Mclean, How the Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Wollongong: University Press, 2011). 19 Gordon Monro’s website, http://www.gordonmonro.com 20 William Latham, Conquest of Form: Computer Art by William Latham (Arnolfini: UK, 1988). 21 Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche, Ed. Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (Routledge: London; New York NY 2012). 222 22 Paul Snell’s website, http://www.paulsnell.com. 23 David Harley’s website, http://www.davidharley.net.



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Installation Installation is also used in a nonobjective way, and can prove to be a strongly conscious interpretation of environment. Pam Aitken and Richard Van der Aa are examples; Richard van der Aa prefers a minimal aesthetic to his installation of regular shapes whereas Pam Aitken states she is concerned about a “truth to material,” repetition, series, and process. Both these artists have been referred to earlier with regard to their involvement with Artist Run Spaces. Louise Blyton 24 manipulates the perfect matt quality and purity of raw pigment on a raw linen ground in her intimate constructions. She shapes and manipulates the substrate of the work geometrically to create two- and three-dimensional smooth immaculate surfaces, taking the work away from the walls or around a corner and into the viewer’s space. They tilt and challenge visual logic and spatial conventions. Also Mark Galea uses installation together with performance when he invites his audience to re-arrange colored Perspex sheets of various sizes to create their own color interpretations.25

The constructed surface Other artists use a construction process to build their works. Richard Dunn at times builds layers of blocks of monochrome colored canvases, at other times alluding to the concept of the constructed layering in a trompe l’oeil fashion.26 Beat Zoderer’s complicated constructs of swirls of colored paper or metal playfully subvert the recognition ability of the everyday within the tradition of geometric construction,27 and Alex Selenitsch layers cut shaped felt pieces, 28 wood, paper, or other materials in his visual exploration of the places of re-settlement and adaption. Sophia Egarchos works with pattern and stripes, but within the confines of constructed substrata that can be either two- or three-dimensional.29

24

Louise Blyton’s website, http://www.louiseblyton.com. Mark Galea, art dealers website, http://www.charlesnodrumgallery.com.au .26 Richard Dunn’s website, http://www.richarddunn.net. 27 Beat Zoderer, art dealers website, http://www.dominikmerschgallery.com/ artist/beat-zoderer. 28 Alex Selenitsch’s website, http://www.heide.com.au/exhibitions/alex-selenitschlife-text. 29 Sophia Egarchos’s website, accessed February 3, 2016, http://www.artabase.net/ artists/6331-sophia-egarchos. 25



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In my own work, I construct the surface of the work by drawing with what I think of as inert pigments; thread and collage.30 And yes, I admit, my work falls into the categorizations mentioned earlier; self imposed limitations, material manipulation, a complex process, and development in series. For me, the construction of the surface, that is the drawing process, once in place, forms the structure or composition. The surface is then heavily worked again with multiple layers of both acrylic and oil paint and a different range of inert pigments to produce a dense monochrome and complex intensity. My aim is to create a work that is subtle, that changes with the light, and has the ability to be re-visited. I am attracted to the abstract concept because it has a freedom of materiality and an open emotional interpretation. It is also free from the constraint of a need for a narrative but still requires an intellectual logic that is enduring. I sense that within the œuvre of the nonfigurative/nonobjective there is an element about it that allows a greater breadth of interpretation and conceptualization. (Plate 13.1)

The postpunk or casualist approach In a shift of aesthetics, recent developments towards a casualist or post punk approach challenge the concept of the resolved or immaculate surface. The most constant and strongest evidence of this way of working has come from the New York area where American artist and constant blogger, Sharon Butler, works towards the breakdown of anything that could be considered highly finished or polished.31 Raw and frayed roughly cut/shaped edges, exposed staples, raw and coarse canvas or jute and exposed support structures create a breakdown of politeness and expose a gritty, nonprecious, experience. Billy Gruner 32 and his partner Sarah Keighery 33 show an interest in this approach, exploring a radical reinterpretation of a modernist approach that incorporates colorfield, geometrical, and concrete art. Paintings are installed juxtaposed with mono colored selected objects. Guy Peppin, on the other hand, collages cut strips of painted and heavily worked canvas, fragmented and

30 Wendy Kelly’s website, http://www.wendykelly.com.au, or http://www.geoform.com. 31 Sharon Butler’s website, http://www.sharonlbutler.com/. 32 Billy Gruner’s website, http://www.sno.org.au/billygruner/. 33 Sarah Keighery’s website, accessed February 3, 2016, http://www.ccnoa.org/ keighery.



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decomposed impulsively,34 to reconstruct in his work, whereas Kate Smith uses a collage system of complexly patterned fabrics and clothing.35

Expressive gesture For other artists, expressive gesture is paramount. Gestural marks in thickly applied oil stick, pastels, inks, or paint are scraped back, rebuilt and manipulated to build raw, active physical surfaces. Here we see a different type of rawness to the casualist approach, with artists using a more traditional substrate and work methods. The act of mark making through layering, gouging, and calligraphic gestural shorthand becomes the passion, and evidence of the process is revealed in the impasto surface of the work or at its encrusted edges. Within these works, although there is some wrist action, the whole body of the artist is involved in the making. There is a concern within these works for a type of mental “game playing” involvement, akin to that required in games like chess, as marks, colors, and gestures are balanced and resolved within the artist’s concerns or limits. The grand gesture can be seen in the deeply concentrated works of Dick Watkins 36 and Aida Tomesque. 37 However gesture need not be grand; it can also be subtle, quiet, or atmospheric, as in the work of Jeannette Siebols. 38 The importance of the choice of media is demonstrated in the work of Monika Tichacek39 and Eugene Carchesio,40 both of whom use gesture within the medium of watercolor which has the effect of dramatically altering the look and feel of the result.

34

Guy Peppin’s website, http://www.guypeppin.com.au. Kate Smith, art dealers website, http://www.suttongallery.com.au/artists/ artistprofile.php?id=58. 36 Richard (Dick) Watkins, art dealers website, http://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au or http://www.artnomad.com.au. 37 Aida Tomescue, art dealers website, www.sulivanstrumpf.com/artists/aidatomescue 38 Jeanette Siebols, art dealers website, http://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au 39 Monica Tichacek’s website, http://www.daao.org.au. 40 Eugene Carchesio’s website, http://www.sno.org.au. 35



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Figure 13.1. Dick Watkins, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 182.5 x 182.5 cm. Courtesy of Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney. Copyright Dick Watkins, licensed by Viscopy, 2016.

Allan Mitelman works with a more reductive minimal approach.41 He has continued for many years to show a subtle monochromatic sensibility in his work, and has developed an art of the quietest mark making using a wide variety of tools. Jenny Sages also scrapes scars and works back into encaustic layering to mark the surface of her covertly romantic landscape references.42

41 42



Allan Mitelman, art dealers website, http://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au. Jenny Sages’s website, http://www.kingstgallery.com.au.

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Minimal to a point A minimalist aesthetic continues to be of interest, but it is used in ways that can be quite intricate. These complex processes form a challenge to minimalism’s accepted norms, and can range from the smooth hand crafted shaped surfaces of a series of works in the installations of Richard Van der Aa, to the materiality of the work of Pam Aitken. To quote Aitken: “Since 1990 I have been engaged with work and thought processes about repetition, reduction, the line, the grid, space, transparency, and the practice of painting itself.”43 Materiality can be extreme, as in Karl Wiebke’s work Untitled B, which took place from 1996 to 2004, during which time he, and it, moved from one side of the continent to the other and the heavy surface was slowly built to an intense density and, despite the many pigments used, the result was almost monochromatic.44 There is a heaviness about the surface that impacts emotively and adds an impression to the work that emphasizes the time factor in its making. The painstaking fineness of the lineal quality and formulaic approach of his more recent work, on this occasion using a limited palette, demonstrates the passing of time also, and the results are subtler.

Geometry Geometric forms of order are an alternative stance to that of the gestural mark. It also comes in many guises, from the floating geometric shapes that sit within the picture plain, to stripes, diagonals, and patterns and also to the more formal grid or structure, which can be either adhered to, fractured and adapted, or sharpened. Artists can incorporate a form of gesture or mark making within a systematic geometric order or negate all evidence of the hand within the work. The geometric influence of the suprematist work of Malevich is evident in George Johnson’s paintings. 45 His works center on complex interconnecting geometric structures or constructions as if they were shadowless objects. Colored geometric shapes cluster to sit together with a suspended controlled elegance. Col Jordan also uses interconnections of geometric shapes or structures, but in an expressionistic high key colored 43

Pam Aitken, website accessed February 5, 2016. www.whitehotmagazine.com/articles/in-conversation-with-pam-aitken/2802. 44 Karl Wiebke, art dealers’ website, http://www.liverpoolstgallery.com.au. 45 George Johnson, art dealers website, http://www.charlesnodrumgallery.com.au.



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“op/pop” way.46 Strident color and contrasts are invigorated by asymmetrical curved and straight forms and constructed space. On the other hand, Andrew Christofides investigates a form of syncopation within a more ordered pattern and geometry, 47 and mutes his palette to evoke urban architectural structures such as bridges and buildings. (Plate 13.2) Malevich and the early Russian abstract artists are also influential in the work of John Nixon,48 of whom Rex Butler stated in his review “has been lauded for continuing the radical experiments of Russian constructivism, criticized for not being truly experimental, and positioned as continuing an avant-garde tradition that somehow brings together the monochrome and the ready-made.” 49 He titles his clusters of geometric mixed media works as Self-Portrait (Non-Objective Composition) and has done so for the past thirty odd years. In doing so, he has indeed made his nonobjective œuvre an image of his concerns, therefore an image of himself. Working with intricate pattern, serial imagery, stripes, and geometric rhythms, Magda Cebokli defuses the use of taped hard edge by the fineness and opticality of the work, concentrating upon an immaculate quality to her surfaces and using a limited and highly controlled palette as her rhythmic stripes move from black through a controlled range of grays to white.50 Occasionally she will introduce a single color into her series, but one senses that it is only done with great caution and consideration. For her, the surface is as if a perfect skin, somewhat akin to the polished surfaces of the early minimalists, however her work uses a complex visual language and sensibility that creates a tension that subtly moves beyond a minimalist aesthetic. The intelligence of mathematics, process, series, opticality, and control form her visual language. (Figure 13.2)

46

Col Jordan’s website, http://www.artofcoljordan.com.au. Andrew Christofides, art dealers website, http://www.kingstgalleries.com.au. 48 Robert, Leonard: John Nixon (Frieze Issue 36 September–October 1997). 49 Rex Butler, “Review of John Nixon,” The Age Newspaper, April 10, 2013, 42. 49 Magda Cebokli’s website, www.magdacebokli.com.au. 47



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Figure 13.2. Magda Cebokli, Square 101.5 x 101.5 cm. Property of the artist.

#5,

2009.

Acrylic

on

canvas,

Rhythm and pattern Lesley Dumbrell also demonstrates the use of serial imagery, self imposed rules, and painstaking process.51 Using the finest brushwork, her delicate patterning in subtle colors are rhythmically based on the grid enlivened by a diagonal emphasis. Her works have a quietness that is engaging and an attention to detail that is mesmerizing. A delight in pattern also informs Cathy Blanchflower’s beautiful and rhythmic works.52 Though laboriously planned and executed, they have over time developed a softer, more organic painterly approach that now permits much greater evidence of touch. Deborah Daws, on the other hand, uses a similar set of geometric pattern “rules” with a strongly contrasting and rigid camouflage 50

Lesley Dunbrell’s website, http://www.lesleydumbrell.com. Cathy Blanchflower, art dealers website, http://www.annandalegalleries.com.au/ artists. 51



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like structural approach.53 She allows some slippage, but the overall result of her huge works has dominance and an intensity that cannot be negated. The strength of the work of Wilma Tabacco lies in the experience of space being controlled by what she calls a mapping concept. 54 In one series of works, she dissects the large boxy text print of the letters from the names of the cities to which she has connections, reducing them to irregular patterns. By reducing the image of the word to a deceptively simple irregular pattern, the works appear to control the complexity of the dissection in a way that maps control information.

Adaptability Some artists have dramatically changed the direction and scope within their practice. Perhaps they have felt a greater freedom as a result of a postmodernist approach and breadth of referencing. Lisa Wolfgramm is one such artist in that her earlier work was grid based patterning and which over the past two or three years has developed onto the manipulation of poured varnish, with not a grid reference to be seen.55 The works have become almost O’Keefe like in their floral exuberance. Also, Jennifer Goodman worked within a manipulated grid form with checker of harmoniously muted colors,56 and has recently shifted to a more organic approach. She has muted her palette even further and, although the shapes are still hard edged, the straight lines are gone. Of the work I have researched, it is the materiality of the tools and media, or to be more contentious, the craft of the art, that designates the interpretation and the sensibility of the abstraction, or perhaps it is the other way around, and the sensibility towards the material has sought the interpretation. It is the investigation and interpretation of the properties of media, be it paint, digital manipulation, geometry, gesture, or construction, which, within the self-imposed rules or limits, develop the individuals’ visual language. The gestural and the geometric are reinterpreted. The grid is used in both rigid form or as a broken or fractured reference. There can be evidence of the hand in the surface or such evidence can be studiously denied or removed. Patterning and strong lineal elements are used, and 52

For information on Deborah Daws, see http://geoform.net/artists/debra-dawes. Wilma Tabacco’s website, http://www.wilmatabacco.com.au. 54 Lisa Wolfgramm’s website, http://www.turnergalleries.com.au. 55 Jennifer Goodmann’s website, http://www.jennifergoodmann.com.au. 53



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color can be saturated, muted, or monochrome and subtle, surfaces smooth, gestural, or impasto. It could be said that these developments may be interpreted as postformalist in that they reference a formalist approach, however they have developed concepts beyond the limits of Greenberg’s abstract expressionist formalist theory. I can accept the logic and philosophy of the earliest development of abstraction (the first generation), although I cannot relate to the idealism, religiosity, or the occult based spiritual/sacred nature of reasoning that proved catalyst to their thinking. Nor can I relate to the political masculinity of the second generation of abstraction. Equally, I cannot see that painting is “dead,” as espoused as a result of a third generation of abstraction. Nor can I condone an elimination of what I consider a genre as was postmodernism’s threat. Indeed, if postmodernism’s role within abstraction is to be examined, the threat has become a hollow one. The result of its examination seems to be seen in the broad eclecticism of current practice, together with the sense that artists have a greater freedom of approach. This in turn brings with it a broadening of interpretation and an ability to change habit/practice/interpretation. If postmodernism is as pluralistic in its approach as it has been deemed, why then could it not include a deconstruction or re-interpretation of abstraction, and take nonfigurative/nonobjective abstraction beyond the modernist/formalist dichotomy? To a point, I feel that this is in the process of occurring, although moderately, and particularly in Europe and America, but the role of abstraction is shifting to become more elitist and alternative on one hand and more decorative and dismissive on the other. Certainly, all visual art is representational in that it refers to something, even if it is a covert reference. Abstraction is an alternative to the representation of “things” per se; nevertheless Nickas feels that every painted picture “is representational because every painting is ultimately a representation of space.” 57 Abstraction acknowledges or represents its precedents, its series, its concept, or inspiration, and its materials. The richness of methods and interpretation plus abstraction’s ability to communicate a broad range of aesthetic emotions ensures its relevance. The attraction for me in the abstract concept is the freedom of material interpretation, the ability of expressiveness and questioning, and its unique nonverbal nonaudio communication, sans the need to tell a story. I contend that current nonobjective nonfigurative abstraction is not simply formulaic, nor is it, as it is sometimes criticized, totally decorative. 56



Nickas, Painting Abstraction, 11.

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There can be little doubt that abstraction in all of its forms is continuing to be explored in these early decades of the twenty-first century, or that critical opinions are as diverse as the approaches artists develop. It continues to be a visual language of endless interpretation and has not lost its emotive edge or its ability to communicate. Motivations are complex and outcomes impressively plural. Infinitely interpretable, defining exactly its role is complex and difficult. But within this surely is part of its strength. In some ways, abstraction has aligned itself with the tradition of painting and less with radical political or social reaction, yet on the other hand, the fact that it continues so strongly, despite marginalization, still evokes the feeling that there is a rebellious streak inherent.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE APPROPRIATION OF “ABSTRACTION” BEYOND THE AESTHETIC WIEBKE GRONEMEYER

Art incorporating processes of abstraction has always been a form of practice with a distinctive self-reflexive approach to art production itself. Artists such as Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, whose art production is foundational to the canon of abstract art, went so far as to critically reject the term “abstract” and replace it with notions of concrete art, “neoplastic” or “abstract-real” for example. 1 To date, the notion of “abstraction” is still treated with caution in the art world, 2 particularly because it has become appropriated in other contexts. For example, abstraction is a fixed term in the financial sector designating capitalist forms of accumulation.3 Artists are not only aware of the complexity that the “abstract” has accumulated as an issue over the years; they incorporate this complexity surrounding notions and forms of abstraction and use it as a point of vantage to launch their own process of abstraction within their art production. This essay looks at contemporary artists that seek to find new forms of articulation for the issues of abstraction prevalent in our times, both aesthetically as well as conceptually. From an art historical perspective, the use of the term “abstraction” revolves around universalist, metaphysical, and ideological interests and objectives. Discussing the artistic practices of 1

Piet Mondrian, “The New Plastic in Painting,” in The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. Harrz Holtzman and Martin S. James (New York: Da Capo, 1993); Theo von Doesburg, “Manifesto of Concrete Art,” Art Concret, April 1930. 2 Maria Lind, Abstraction (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013). 3 Alberto Toscano, “The Culture of Abstraction,” Theory, Culture & Society, no. 25 (July 2008): 57–75.

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Liam Gillick and Falke Pisano in this context explores how the language of abstraction is used contemporaneously to challenge categories of perception, representation, and reflection. I argue that these artists appropriate the language of abstraction in order to address the paradigmatic struggle between modernism’s self-reflexivity and postmodernism’s appropriation of aesthetic concerns, abstraction being one of them. This struggle will become particularly apparent by looking at examples of the collaborative practice of Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. Their artistic practice is concerned with contemporary processes of abstraction, albeit not translating these concerns into their work visually. The artists do not employ a nonfigurative language themselves, but, similarly to the artists of the early twentieth century, Creischer and Siekmann are concerned with processes of abstraction for imagining and proposing new models of social organization. Discussing their work will reveal the necessity to further differentiate between abstraction as a visual language and abstraction as an artistic process that might not necessarily lead to its visual implementation anymore, particularly in order to circumvent the appropriation and co-optation of visual nonfigurative language that we have witnessed in postwar cultural production.4

Abstraction as a (failed) visible form By making the abstract concrete, art no longer retains any abstract quality, it merely announces a constant striving for a state of abstraction and in turn produces more abstraction to pursue.5

For thinking about artistic practices involved in processes of concretization of “the abstract,” Liam Gillick (b. 1964) reckons with the history of abstraction, particularly its incarnation into visible form, to the extent of declaring that “the creation of an art of the abstract is a tautology.” 6 Thereby he refers to the impossibility of manifesting the “non-existence” of abstraction into concrete form. “The grander the failed representation of the abstract becomes the more striking the presence of failure . . . .”7

4

Pamela Scorzin’s essay in this book. Liam Gillick, “Abstract,” in Abstraction, ed. Maria Lind (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013), 211. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 5



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It is this failure of the abstract that lures and hypnotizes—forcing itself onto artists and demanding repeated attention. The abstract draws artists towards itself as a semi-autonomous zone just out of reach. It produces the illusion of a series of havens and places that might reduce the contingent everyday to a sequence of distant inconveniences. It is the concretization of the abstract into a series of failed forms that lures the artist into repeated attempts to “create” the abstract—fully aware that this very act produces things that are the representation of impossibilities. In the current context this means that the abstract is a realm of denial and deferment—a continual reminder to various publics that varied acts of art has taken place and the authors were probably artists.8

Historically, reckoning with abstraction as an artistic process in such a defiant manner is nothing new—in fact, the pragmatism with which Gillick tackles the subject matter of failed representations of the abstract could be viewed as consequential in relation to how Theo van Doesburg declared in his 1930 Manifesto for Concrete Art that “a pictorial element does not have any meaning beyond ‘itself’; as a consequence, a painting does not have any meaning other than ‘itself’.”9 The ultimate reflection of a work of art—particularly a painting—onto itself is a recursive process that leads to further abstraction. In this respect, Gillick points out that “the abstraction that is produced by abstract art is not a reflection of the abstraction at the start of the process. . . . the art object in this case is merely a marker or waypoint towards new abstraction.”10 While the artists devoted to abstract, concrete, or constructivist art of the early twentieth century would certainly take their issue with Gillick’s withering perspective on the role of the art object, the recursiveness of the process of abstraction is something they would agree with. This recursiveness is, in Gillick’s words, the “potential of abstraction,” while the failure at the heart of the abstract is “its enduring critical potential.”11 The procedure of producing abstract art does not fill the world with lots of abstraction—despite appearances to the contrary—instead it populates the space of art with an excess of pointers that in turn direct attention towards previously unaccounted for abstractions. This is at the heart of the lure of the abstract—this explains why artists keep returning to the elusive zone.12 8

Gillick, “Abstract,” 211. Amy Dempsey, Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 159. 10 Gillick, “Abstract,” 212. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 9



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Liam Gillick’s own work has often been shown in the context of abstract art, particularly in exhibitions exploring the history of abstraction as an artistic process. For example, in 2014 Gillick was part of a group show at Whitechapel Gallery (London) titled Adventures of the Black Square. Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015. The exhibition assembled over one hundred works of art, both historical and contemporary, categorized in four different thematic sections—“Utopia,” “Architectonics,” “Communication,” and the “Everyday.” 13 The relationship between abstract art and politics and society was of specific interest to the curators, particularly concerning the question in what way abstract art aims at transforming the world, or was defined as having a cultural impact that makes it possible to change the political and social conditions we live in. Within the “Architectonics” section, Liam Gillick exhibited Big Conference Platform Platform (1998, Fig. 14.1), a sculptural object consisting of an aluminum window-like frame that is suspended from the ceiling well above the head of the visitors to the exhibition. The frame is divided by aluminum strips that divide its surface into horizontal panes filled with Plexiglas colored in different shades of off-white, while two panes remained clear. Given the context of Gillick’s writing on the abstract (2011), which is quoted earlier above, it seems inconsequential and even hypocritical that Gillick would produce nonfigurative art objects. But it is the artist’s own contention with the notion of failure of representation of the abstract that brings him closer to thinking through abstraction as an artistic process. Abstraction is not the contrary of representation . . . rather abstraction in art is the contrary of the abstract in the same way that representation is the contrary of the real.14

Aware of the complexity that surrounds the relation between notions of abstraction, representation, imagination, and reality, Gillick refers to the “concrete structure” as a “failure” when it comes to being an abstraction. Rather, “the concrete structure becomes a marker that signifies art and points to all other art as structures that contain excessive subjectivities.”15 Thinking this exploration of abstraction further and in relation to Gillick’s own artworks, the artist could claim that the lack of any functional role of 13 “Adventures of the Black Square,” http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/ press/adventures-black-square-abstract-art-society-1915-2015/. 14 Gillick, “Abstract,” 212. 15 Ibid.



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Figure 14.1. Liam Gillick, Big Conference Platform Platform, 1998. Sculpture display 16 in the exhibition Adventures of the Black Square at the Whitechapel Gallery January 15 to April 06, 2015. Courtesy of the Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive.

an abstract art object beyond recursively referring back to itself as a further process of abstraction, is in fact a useful tautology. The failure at the heart of the abstract is its enduring critical potential. The demonstration of the concrete brings down metaphors, allusions and other tools that can be deployed for multiple ends to a set of knowable facts. Any attempt to represent through art will always deploy a degree of artifice— this is not a moral judgment, just a state of things. The failed abstract reproduces itself. It does not point to anything other than its own concrete form. Its concrete presence replaces the attempt to pin down the abstract

16

The four works alongside Gillick’s sculpture from left to right are: Clay Ketter, I Don’t Remember, 2006; Kostis Velonis, Lissitzky was a Craftsman Hero, 2007-8 (second on left); Andrea Zittel, Bench (after Judd) #2, 2014 (floor sculpture); R. H. Quaytman, Chapter 24, 2012 (Silkscreen print on the wall).



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and becomes a replacement object that only represents the potential of the abstract.17

Hence, looking at Big Conference Platform Platform (Fig. 14.1) would, according to Gillick, mean to look through the work of art—quite literally given the see-through material of which it is composed of—and interpret its function as a replacement object for thinking about the potential of abstraction as an artistic process. In this sense, the artist proposes to appropriate the visible abstract form, using its “failure to be an abstraction” as its “enduring critical potential” to endlessly reproduce itself.18 Here, however, the paradox inherent to Gillick’s argument is becoming apparent and demonstrates that the appropriation of the abstract goes far beyond the aesthetic. On the one hand, Gillick condemns the production of “replacement objects as key markers within the trajectory of twentieth century modernism” as “what provokes confused and sublime responses”.19 The production of concrete objects is, according to the artist, a production of “reminders of the failure of the concrete in relation to the abstract.”20 On the other hand, Gillick’s own works of art could be seen functioning as replacement objects fulfilling a “desire to keep showing the impossibility and elusiveness of the abstract.”21 Hereby, Gillick refers not only to the visible forms of the abstract, but also to the concept of abstraction as a process of contemplation and reflection, which is equally elusive and thus invites processes of manipulation that take place within unaccountable realms of capital—the continual attempt to concretize abstract relationships and therefore render them into a parallel form that can be more easily exchanged. . . . The abstract art produced alongside such a period is a necessity. Forming a sequence of test sites to verify and enable us to remain vigilant about the processes of concretisation that take place around us in the service of capital. The transformation of relationships into objects via a mature sensitivity to a process of concretisation is tested and tracked when the most vivid current artists deploy what appears to be abstract but is in fact a conscious deployment of evasive markers.22 17

Gillick, “Abstract,” 212–213. Ibid., 213. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 213–214. 18



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Abstraction as an operational tool Such “conscious deployment” also applies to the work of Dutch artist Falke Pisano (b. 1978), whose practice is both a performative and spatial exploration of abstraction as form of communication in general, and as language in particular. The artist describes her series of works titled Figures of Speech (2006–2010) as resulting “of a long term examination of processes that occur, when ‘objects’ start shifting their form, materiality, meaning, description, understanding, role, agency . . .” 23 Pisano starts with articulating an idea, mainly in writing, and lets that idea circulate in her performative practice, in which the production of works involves the transformation, circulation, and exchange of ideas, abstract forms, and language. Several formulations come back in different works; formulations of ideas for works become works; descriptions of works are used in preceding or following works and there is an exchange between descriptive or explanatory texts about the work and the work itself. Simultaneously there is a continuous development of a formal language in relation to the content.24

The notion of “abstraction” is central to Pisano’s artistic practice in more than one way, and of particular interest to exploring the production of abstraction beyond aesthetic parameters. Early works from this series include Affecting Abstraction (The Complex Object) (2007, Fig. 14.2 to 14.4), a series of performances with Powerpoint presentations. The performative lectures, in which the artist reads about how the geometric lines we see in the Powerpoint slides (Fig. 14.3 and 14.4) are conceived in relation to concrete abstract objects, have the goal to construct an object “through” language. For Pisano, this means that what is said about a work has a direct effect on the work. The language is the material the artist works with, while it is at the same time its subject matter. The development of the work throughout the performance (Fig. 14.2) is a public act. Therefore, it is important to understand the performativity of the work in relation to the objectivity with which Pisano articulates the formation and transformation of abstract thought in language.

23

“Figures of Speech,” Falke Pisano’s official website, http://falkepisano.info/ introduction-figures-of-speech. 24 Ibid.



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Figure 14.2. Falke Pisano, The Complex Object, 2007. Performance, 25 min, Lisson Gallery, 2007.



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Figure 14.3 and 14.4. Falke Pisano, The Complex Object, 2007. Video 21:40 min, Performance 25 min. Video still/slide-series.



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What can be considered the work of art here is twofold: on the one hand, Pisano understands the process of developing thoughts and articulating them in and through language as the development of a “complex object” in language; on the other hand, this entire process is presented as a performative work of art. Thus, the “complex object” built in language as well as the performance of building a “complex object” are both works of art. This duality, which is not necessarily contradictory but complementary, is at the heart of Pisano’s practice of abstraction from the works of art to the conditions of their production. She invites the viewers to take part in a process of abstraction with her, presenting the abstract as a linguistic work is progress: I deal with the first sense on a level of language and by insisting that what is said in a work has a direct effect on, and therefore changes, the material I work with and the conditions in my practice. The transparent, public construction and development of my work and ideas, on the other hand, is crucial to the understanding of performativity in connection to the notion of virtuosity as examined by Virno in Grammar of a Multitude. According to Virno, an activity is virtuous when it finds its own fulfilment, in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a “finished product,” or into an object that would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity that requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience. Of course I do make “end products,” so this idea exists more on a structural level instead of being concretely put into practice. These end products (like objects, performances, texts, works in other media or interviews, for instance) I see as moments of communication, constituting entrances to a structure that is activated through an investment in it.25

While there is no aesthetic or conceptual similarity between Gillick’s and Pisano’s practice, the idea to use the process of abstraction in order to think of artistic practice as a complex web of forms of production, dogmas of productivity, and the making of products, is relevant to both artists. Pisano equally appropriates the aesthetic of abstract art in her work (geometric shapes, color schemes, etc.) to shift attention from the end product to the process of production. While Gillick enlists the “failure” of the abstract visible form, Pisano makes the communication about the work the work itself. Thereby, she intends to refer the viewer back to the process of communication that produces the work. While Gillick’s object is disconnected from its origin, an abstract notion, and as such is no longer 25

Vincenzo de Bellis, “Falke Pisano: Space in Language,” Mousse Magazine, no. 19, June 2009, http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=94.



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relevant to the actual world as we know it—assuming a tautological existence—Pisano’s Complex Object claims a different kind of freedom for itself: “The object of which this is the first sentence doesn’t yet exist. . . . It needs to be constructed.”26 Abstraction, here, is not a process in which thought is abstracted from material. Rather, and to the contrary, it is a process that starts from nothing and ends with far more than an end product; on a visual level it is a familiar form of nonfigurative representation. But on the level of communication bound to language, what is produced here is the recuperation of abstraction as an artistic process into a sphere of perception that explores experience not as a system of reflections on aesthetic perception in relation to facts, but as a subjective process tormented by uncertainties, chance, and, first and foremost, the interdependency of communication between one and another. Abstraction, hence, is not a singular act, but a necessarily ongoing and contingent revision of form versus content, process versus halt, certainty versus contingency.

Abstraction—the dematerialization of the visual Pisano’s artistic practice would be unthinkable without the efforts of dematerialization that the artists of the mid-1960s championed. The situation for contemporary artists, however, has gotten more complex. Abstraction as a process of dematerialization from the physical object has been caught up in a web of complex forms of appropriation of knowledge production. A work’s nonobjective, dematerialized status is no longer a guarantee for its degree of autonomy from not being recuperated into the status of an object by the knowledge economy. For contemporary discursive practices, the category of the work needs to be rethought and reformulated in a way that accords with its dematerialized status, which is crucially important for situating abstraction in the context of the commodification of knowledge production. Curator Simon Sheikh gives a precise account of the double process at stake: Since the 1960s, with the advent of minimal sculpture, conceptual art and site specific practices, art institutions have had to take the double process of dematerialization of the art object on the one hand and the so called expanded field of art practices on the other, into account. Which, in turn, has led to the establishing of new public platforms and formats, not just 26



Falke Pisano, Figures of Speech (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2010), 31.

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Chapter Fourteen exhibition venues, but also the production of exhibitions in different types of venues, as well as creating venues that are not primarily for exhibition. The crucial shift that cannot be emphasized enough is accurately best described as “art conquering space” by Chevrier, who has written of how this conquest has facilitated a shift in emphasis from the production and display of art objects to what he calls “public things.” Whereas the object stands in relation to objectivity, and thus apart from the subject, the thing cannot be reduced to a single relation, or type of relation.27

To perceive the artistic product resulting from processes of abstraction as a “thing” builds into the process of communication a constant renegotiation of the positionalities assumed by stakeholders in the discursive formations. In addition to such renegotiations of positionalities (spectatorship, audience conceptions, public address), the ethical and political quality of the discursive as a model of practice is in need for deliberation. Sheikh sheds light on the conflictive situation of dematerialized artistic practices, whose intention to reflect on the meanings of art—its social and political responsibility and function within the sphere of cultural production—led to forms of discursive practices that seek to evade processes of commodification while simultaneously caught up in them. We can then, perhaps, talk of a linguistic turn, meaning that language and (inter)textuality have become increasingly privileged and important, in art practice, the staging of the discourses around art, the aestheticization of discourse, and the new knowledge-based industries such as marketing, PR and services. Similarly, and also simultaneously, as art has become dematerialized and expanded, labour itself has become dematerialized and expanded, we could say, and production shifted towards a cultural industry and the so-called knowledge economy.28

Abstraction as a social structure What is subject to processes of commodification in the knowledge economy is precisely the process of abstraction in discursive formations, which lies in the recursivity intrinsic to processes of relation-building in contemporary art practices. Art historian Ina Blom proposes that it is the self-reference as a nucleus of abstraction that is subject to change for 27 Simon Sheikh, “Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research,” Art and Research 2, no. 2 (2009), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/sheikh.html. 28 Simon Sheikh, “Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge?.”



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abstraction to maintain a category of artistic production in contemporary times: If Modernism still sought to postulate a notion of abstraction that was meant to be based on the idea of aesthetic self-reference, abstraction under the conditions of post-Fordism and of immaterial production can be conceived of as a category involved in all areas of society.29

Blom attributes the loss of an autopoietic character of selfreferentiality inherent to abstraction to the fact that in recent decades, the visual forms of abstraction were rebranded as design. Together with the rise of technology producing surfaces for social interaction, such design is made subject to and aims at “the productivity of an aesthetically stylized life.”30 It is useful to take into account how Blom talks about the appropriation of abstraction for exploring the role of abstraction in contemporary society and how artists address it. Liam Gillick and Falke Pisano—although with very distinct means—both go beyond addressing abstraction as a principal of creation of nonfigurative representation and rather form spaces of interaction that are geared towards the production of sociality. Thereby, these spaces of abstraction are subject to the situation of their construction (e.g. Pisano’s performative lectures) and presentation (e.g. the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition Gillick was part of). It is necessary to understand these spaces of abstraction as “site-specific” and “situational” in order to determine the political and social potential of abstract art in post-Fordist economy, in which “intensified processes of ‘life-aesthetics’ or self-styling” are the “basis for the specific alignment of governmental and capital interest.” 31 Blom thus advocates to recognize strategies of artistic abstraction as “interventions” in the “elusive continuity between artistic, aesthetic and social forces established by a politics that capitalizes on mental and bodily processes, the forces of sensation and affects.”32

29

Ina Blom, “The Logic of the Trailer: Abstraction, Style and Sociality in Contemporary Art,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 69, March 2008, 164. 30 Blom, “The Logic of the Trailer,” 166. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 166–167.



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The materialization of abstraction The appropriation of “abstraction” beyond the aesthetic describes a set of claims that require a series of interconnected thoughts, recursive in nature, but not necessarily self-referential: (1) “Abstraction” is a thoughtprovoking process that artists continue to use for thinking about the conditions of artistic production; since these conditions belong to the cultural, social, and political realms, (2) practices of abstraction depend on and also have an effect on the forms of production prevalent to these realms. “But what, then, is the relation of abstract art to an increasingly ‘abstract’ world? . . . Can the globalization of abstraction be represented at all by artistic means?” 33 The questions that Sven Lütticken asks at the beginning of an essay titled “Living with Abstraction” are geared towards addressing the relationship between the claims of aesthetic modernism oriented towards autonomous self-reflection and the laws of exchange value that govern social and economic conditions today in a way that leads to an abstraction from reality. Lütticken’s questions frame the interest of this text, which more specifically explores processes of abstraction used by artists that are critically aware of the conflict of abstraction as both a utopian form of imagination as well as a dangerous alienation from reality in social, economic, political, and cultural terms. This article looks at examples of Gillick’s and Pisano’s artistic practices with specific attention to what kind of processes of abstraction the artists use or to what notion of the abstract the artists refer to. In both cases, the abstract designates a duality. On the one hand, the abstract is used as an aesthetic principle; the artists employ a visual abstract language. On the other hand, abstraction is used as a conceptual form of communication that recursively addresses the subject matter of the abstract. In both artists’ work, thereby, the conceptual use of abstraction as a form of communication is premised upon the appropriation of abstract aesthetics, since their preliminary interpretation only serves to turn the subject matter onto the role of abstraction itself. Such a process of abstraction from visual forms of the abstract towards abstraction as a social structure is best understood when looking at an example of artistic practice that is predominantly concerned with conceptual abstraction—without alluding to or making use of its aesthetic form. An example of such a practice is the work of German artists 33

Sven Lütticken, “Living with Abstraction,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 69, March 2008, 132.



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Andreas Siekmann (b. 1961) and Alice Creischer (b. 1960). A shared concern of their otherwise individual artistic practices is developing a radical critique of structures of power and domination while searching for alternative living and working conditions. One of their most recent exhibitions, In the Stomach of the Predators 34 (2014) enquires into the continuous exploitive nature of advanced capitalism. Siekmann’s installation is a series of pictograms showing a systematic narrative of signs and symbols about the history of seed monopolization that uncovers the entangled complicities of seed banks with corporate lobbies with regard to issues of crop diversity and genetic manipulations. Creischer’s work aesthetically works on a very different level—less graphical and pictorial, but equally systematic. The film-based installation includes four sculptures of predators (wolf, hyena, bear, jackal) that function to represent different cases of privatization and monopolization of commons. The animals are at the center of a surreal narrative that develops throughout the installation parodying the economic conditions and political abysses not only of the devastation of human resources, but also the art system in its neoliberal condition in general. The pair are engaged in an ongoing reflection, inspired by institutional critique, on the constraints that limit the possibilities for artistic action today, but they are simultaneously on a quest to revive militant forms of aesthetic and political commitment.35

Art historian André Rottmann describes Creischer’s and Siekmann’s practices with regard to what function they assume in their roles as artists in the field of contemporary cultural production. Particularly their exhibition projects,36 which most of the time result from extensive yearlong research processes, put this function to the test: their interest in 34 The exhibition was held at BAK, Utrecht, and ran from November, 1 until December 28, 2014: “In the Stomach of the Predators,” http://www.bakonline.org/ en/Research/Itineraries/FutureVocabularies/Survival/InTheStomachOfThePredator s?query=BAK%2C+Utrecht+%28NL%29. The exhibition is the latest chapter in the development of this work that was first exhibited collaboratively at the Bergen Assembly in 2012, and the Benin and Instanbul Biennials in 2013. In 2014, Creischer and Siekmann exhibited their works separately at their respective Berlin galleries, before uniting the installations again at BAK. 35 André Rottmann et al., “1000 Words: Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann Talk about “Principio Potosí,” Artforum, September 2010, 300. 36 “The Potosí Principle,” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2010/potosi/ausstellung_potosi/ausstell ung_potosi.php.



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disrupting the institutional mechanisms complicit with neoliberal ideologies affects their own work as artists with the institutions that host their exhibitions. However, as Rottmann observes, “potential conflicts are inherent in such activities, and this possibility is both the burden this sort of praxis must bear and the motor that powers it.”37 The role that the abstract plays in Creischer and Siekmann’s collaborative artistic practice is that it presents them with a testing ground. The notion of the abstract in contemporary times is a complex web of associations with an intrinsic subversive potential that is founded in the history of nonfigurative art at the beginning of the twentieth century. The various associations with the term abstract or abstraction have since then been co-opted by forces aimed at establishing dominant power structures for social organization. These processes are what Cresicher and Siekmann aim at uncovering and showing—privatization of the commons, devastation of natural resources, financial speculation as an effect of economic abstraction. The artists make the abstract concrete by showing processes of its materialization, however, not by making abstract work (according to Gillick concrete abstraction only produces more abstraction), but by producing work that tells the story of what real effects processes of abstraction have in the world. For example, the exhibition In the Stomach of the Predators (BAK, 2014) particularly looks at cases of seeds, land rights, and intellectual property. Siekmann’s pictorial displays uncover the ties between a Norwegian seed bank that supposedly exists to protect architectural produce and corporate stakeholders that exercise power to diminish agricultural diversity and promote genetic manipulation. Creischer’s filmic stagings sent four crafted animal figures—the wolf, the hyena, the bear, and the jackal—on a journey from Norway to Istanbul on which they encounter surreal settings. The theatrical quality of the dialogue that unfolds on topics such as the global gene pool heritage or land grabbing is at once a testimony to art’s subversive potential when processes of abstraction unfold linguistically in front of the viewer. Yet, the level of reflection also refers to art’s complacency with capital flows. Sven Lütticken argues that “we are the natives of abstraction,” meaning that we should understand abstraction as the prevailing condition of modernity, as our common world cannot be explored from the outside.38 Lütticken seeks to “sound out possibilities for an aesthetic contestation in

37 38



Rottmann et al., “1000 Words,” 300. Lütticken, “Living with Abstraction,” 138.

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conjunction with a political one.”39 Discussing Creischer and Siekmann’s practice at the end of this essay, I propose that for understanding the appropriation and instrumentalization of abstraction emerging from, as well as directed at the current regime of abstraction and accumulation, it is necessary to think about the possibility of visualizing abstraction beyond the abstract visible form. Then, the duality of abstraction as an aesthetic principle as well as a form of communication—as discussed earlier— becomes obvious and comprehensible. Siekmann and Creischer articulate a dissonance: rather than aiming to conceive an aesthetic representation of their conceptual ideas, the artists emphasize the materials and processes of practices of abstraction in order to critically address the social, economic, and political conditions of our contemporary times. Their aesthetic language borders on information design, using graphic patterns to visualize the patterns and flows of the kind of real financial abstraction that we often fail to understand conceptually, nonetheless aesthetically. Thereby the collaborative artistic practice of the artists playfully addresses the implicitness of abstract visual language in power structures and modes of social organization, not to “simply” problematize abstraction, but to resist it. The materialization of abstraction is, ultimately, also a form of appropriation of abstraction, not of its aesthetic contention, but its form as communication.

39

Sven Lütticken, “Concrete Abstraction: Our Common World,” open!, January 6, 2015, http://www.onlineopen.org/concrete-abstraction.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN REFRESH ABSTRACTION! DAY GLO NEO GEO PAMELA C. SCORZIN

During the spring season 2013, the British style magazine for designoriented people, Dazed & Confused, launched a series of articles online that were titled “The Return of Abstract Art,” followed by a teaser that read “[t]he unthinkable has happened: abstract painting is back.” 1 (Fig. 15.1)

Figure 15.1. Screenshot of the Dazed & Confused website, April 4, 2015. 1

Francesca Gavin, “The Return of Abstract Art,” Dazed, accessed April 4, 2015, http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/15728/1/the-return-of-abstractart.

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And, at the same time, it asked why nowadays abstract painting seems to be felt fresh and new again, especially for a younger generation of artists and designers world-wide: So why does sculptural [emphasis added] painting make sense in our postfinancial-crisis, screen-centric world? . . . Contemporary abstract painting is different to previous incarnations for a few reasons. It did not emerge in opposition to representational painting. It’s not like we are living in times where painted images of the world are dominant. The grand history of paint is also not the point. It’s almost one hundred years since Kazimir Malevich painted Black Square, and its utopian aspects feel old-fashioned. Gone is the enticing communist idea that anti-representation meant antiestablishment. The modernist abstract paintings of the 1930s and 40s, the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s, even the neo-abstraction of the 1980s seem long past. And yet regular visitors to exhibitions or art fairs today can’t help but notice the prominence of abstract artworks on the walls.2

Contemporary abstraction has turned into a decisive factor on the international art market again recently. Without further specifying their arguments, art buyers and pop-cultural journalists have embraced and emphasized its difference to former forms of abstraction. Meanwhile, since the American artist and critic Walter Robinson coined the phrase “Zombie Formalism” for its resurrection in his infamous article “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism” for the online magazine Artspace in 2014, some members of the established international art world outside the globalized art market continue to bash abstraction fiercely. One thing I’m hearing these days, loud and clear, is the hum of an art style that I like to call Zombie Formalism. “Formalism” because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting (yes, I admit it, I’m hung up on painting), and “Zombie” because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s black paintings, among other things. Do I need to prove that formalist abstraction is a walking corpse? Will a quote from the book jacket of Florence Rubenfeld’s “Clement Greenberg: A Life” (1997) do? “By the late 1970s, ‘Clembashing’ had become the art world’s favorite indoor sport.” The rejection of “Greenbergianism” was absolutely central to SoHo art conversation in those pre-Chelsea days. And as the ‘80s got under way, with the decade’s double focus on neo-expressionism and postmodernist photography, Greenberg dropped out of the debate altogether. His aesthetic principles persist, however. Two notable examples of Zombie Formalism 2



Francesca Gavin, “The Return of Abstract Art.”

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would be the electroplated silver monochromes of Jacob Kassay (b. 1984) and the “Rain Paintings” of Lucien Smith (b. 1989), both recent favorites of the art flippers. . . . With their simple and direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, and can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings. . . . Finally, these pictures all have certain qualities—a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm—that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design. Another important element of Zombie Formalism is what I like to think of as a simulacrum of originality. Looking back at art history, aesthetic importance is measured by novelty, by the artist doing something that had never been done before. In our Postmodernist age, “real” originality can be found only in the past, so we have today only its echo. Still, the idea of the unique remains a premiere virtue. Thus, Zombie Formalism gives us a series of artificial milestones, such as the first-ever painting made with the electroplating process (Kassay), and the first-ever painting done using paint applied in a fire extinguisher (Smith). 3

However, following this polemic, it was Jerry Saltz, the renowned senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine, who has stirred up a major discussion on the incredible resurrection of abstraction by citing this pejorative phrase along with the neologism “Crapstraction” in his controversial publication “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?” for Vulture in June 2014.4 He primarily blames a globalized art market and its influential new protagonists, a closed network of trendsetting advisors, speculating collectors and powerful sellers: The artists themselves are only part of the problem here. Many of them are acting in good faith, making what they want to make and then selling it. But at least some of them are complicit, catering to a new breed of hungry, high-yield risk-averse buyers, eager to be part of a rapidly widening niche industry. The ersatz art in which they deal fundamentally looks the way other art looks. It’s colloquially been called modest abstraction, neomodernism, M.F.A. Abstraction, and Crapstraction. (The gendered variants 3 Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace, accessed April 3, 2014, http://www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/ the_rise_of_zombie_formalism. 4 Jerry Saltz, “Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?,” Vulture, June 17, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-newabstract-paintings-look-the-same.html.



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Chapter Fifteen are Chickstraction and Dickstraction.) Rhonda Lieberman gets to the point with “Art of the One Percent” and “aestheticized loot.” I like Dropcloth Abstraction, and especially the term coined by the artist-critic Walter Robinson: Zombie Formalism. . . . Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just “new” or “dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences. . . . These artists are acting like industrious junior post-modernist worker bees, trying to crawl into the body of and imitate the good old days of abstraction, deploying visual signals of suprematism, color-field painting, minimalism, post-minimalism, Italian Arte Povera, Japanese Mono-ha, process art, modified action painting, all gesturing toward guys like Polke, Richter, Warhol, Wool, Prince, Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Wade Guyton, Rudolf Stingel, Sergej Jensen, and Michael Krebber. . . . Much of this product is just painters playing scales, doing finger exercises, without the wit or the rapport that makes music. Instead, it’s visual Muzak, blending in. Most Zombie Formalism arrives in a vertical format, tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via jpeg on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn’t see shows of this work, since it offers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn’t change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It’s frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin. . . . In one day at Frieze last month, three major art dealers pulled me aside to say that, although they agreed that we’re awash in Crapstraction, their artist was “the real deal.” I told each dealer what the other had said to me, and that each had named a different hot artist. I’ll admit that I don’t hate all of this work. Frankly, I like some of it. The saddest part of this trend is that even better artists who paint this way are getting lost in the onslaught of copycat mediocrity and mechanical art. Going to galleries is becoming less like venturing into individual arks and more like going to chain stores where everything looks familiar. My guess is that, if and when money disappears from the art market again, the bottom will fall out of this genericism. Everyone will instantly stop making the sort of painting that was an answer to a question that no one remembers asking—and it will never be talked about again.5

“Crapstraction” or “Zombie Formalism”—in whatever newly coined term, it is now slashed down in one of the biggest current debates of the 5



Jerry Saltz, “Zombies on the Walls.”

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contemporary international art world—concerns the rise of abstract painting, which seems to be today’s biggest success just everywhere. Thus, in the March 2013 print issue of Dazed & Confused, its chief visual arts editor, Francesca Gavin, delved a little deeper into the topic of the remarkable return and astonishing resurgence of a fully commoditized contemporary and “stylish” abstract art in the broader fields of fashion, art, and popular culture. Alongside the full print feature published monthly, readers could check back every week on the magazine’s website Dazed Digital for daily updates with some more lavished features on ten selected new young abstract artists that the editors recommended to watch out for. And, at the same time, in spring 2013, a number of major shows on the subject in world’s leading cultural institutions have given a serious stamp to contemporary abstract art again as well: Painter Painter at Chicago’s Walker Art Centre was exhibiting new work by fifteen abstract painters, including Katy Moran, Molly Zuckerman–Hartung, and Matt Connors. The show was mainly intended as a snapshot of contemporary studio practice. From March to September 2013, the Modern Museum of Art in New York showed the art historical exhibitions Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 6 and Abstract Generation: Now in Print. The latter show focused on the print medium, highlighting ways in which abstraction has played a generative role in works of the past decades. It brought together abstract print works in the museum’s collection by contemporary artists including Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach, Liam Gillick, Wade Guyton, Haegue Yang, R. H. Quaytman, and Charline von Heyl. The exhibition aimed to examine current notions of abstraction through a range of contemporary practices by featuring a real sense of cross-media experimentation around contemporary abstract art. However, the rather controversial debate on the new rise of abstract art seemed to culminate with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s show Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (New York, December 14, 2014 to April 5, 2015). “After the End of Art” (Arthur C. Danto), with seemingly no more linear succession and chronological progression of one original and innovative art movement after another, an “atemporal” and “posthistoric” era has now been observed and declared since the millennium, and therefore the New York Museum of Modern Art stated in its press release for its grand survey show: 6

Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, eds. Leah Dickerman, Matthew Affron and David Frankel (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), published in conjunction with the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.



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Chapter Fifteen Forever Now presents the work of 17 artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of this new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. This phenomenon in culture was first identified by the science fiction writer William Gibson, who used the term “a-temporality” to describe a cultural product of our moment that paradoxically doesn’t represent, through style, through content, or through medium, the time from which it comes. A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of twentieth-century art in a single painting or across an œuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms. The artists in this exhibition represent a wide variety of styles and impulses, but all use the painted surface as a platform, map, or metaphoric screen on which genres intermingle, morph, and collide. Their work represents traditional painting, in the sense that each artist engages with painting’s traditions, testing and ultimately reshaping historical strategies like appropriation and bricolage and reframing more metaphysical, high-stakes questions surrounding notions of originality, subjectivity, and spiritual transcendence.7

So, in view of all this, we might further ask: Why timeless abstraction now? When has abstraction paradoxically become pop culture? And what is it that makes today’s abstraction so different, so appealing? A difference and attractiveness that some critics condemn as pure decoration, blandness, and naiveté, and an art market-driven hype, as well as highly compatible to social media censorship due to its lack of tricky figuration and its inoffensive visual language. Francesca Gavin 8 is convinced that it is not just the fickleness of fashion, style, and taste. The New Abstraction is (re)born out of a certain attitude. In sum, the most obvious attraction of contemporary abstract painting lies in its reaction against technology and the virtual with its characteristic aesthetics and specific rhetoric. Timeless Abstraction now seems to reflect our eternal need and new greed for real, handmade objects in a screen-based, virtualized world since real color in paint, for example, 7

Museum of Modern Art, Exhibition Announcement of “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” https://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1498. 8 Gavin, “The Return of Abstract Art.”



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is incredibly different to what you get from an inkjet printer or pixel grid on a screen or in a projection. Obviously, there is something about material realness and its concrete physicality that these contemporary new abstract paintings, mass delivered to a globalized art market as consumable and affordable products, bring to the fore. However, at the same time, they adopt and combine these characteristics of their realness and art historical heritage with the shiny new aesthetic of a digital culture and the fashionable colors of the so-called techno-culture. And, their concrete materiality and texture then might be considered as an antidote to the texturelessness of our daily digital lives: When you read about painting one particular word often emerges: faith. These artists and viewers seem to believe in paint. At moments of social instability there is a security in earth, in pigment, in something you can touch. Value is something we project—on to objects, money, people, concepts. Paintings make that process the most obvious. 9

And, at the same time, part of the fascination and attraction today is how open the abstract is to interpretation. Some upcoming contemporary artists like David Otrowski, for example, who is based in Berlin and represented by Peres Projects, are intentionally playing on that particular openness and freedom, pushing the limits and claiming to paint pictures of nothing—if at all possible! The main thing this new younger generation of international abstract painters is using to celebrate and to rethink abstraction is an emphasis not so much on progress, but on process with a capital P, as Francesca Gavin already has further stressed: The journey appears to be the focus far more than the results these days. There is a fascination with materials that borders on fetishism. How the work is made is arguably the whole point. Alex Hubbard’s practice is a fascinating riff on ideas around process. . . . The intensity of color in his paintings is partly a reaction of the dominance and dullness of ubiquitous black—his Just Like Pants exhibition included work with a palette taken from Four Loko cans.10

More of a speculative nature is, however, another popularly assumed reason abstract paintings might resonate now: According to Francesca Gavin, it 9

Gavin, “The Return of Abstract Art.” Ibid.

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Chapter Fifteen is because of the ongoing financial crisis; people with money are buying paintings. As (Bob) Nickas points out, “Abstraction is probably desirable for certain buyers because it doesn’t demand too much. There’s no disturbing content, nothing overtly sexual or political or offensive. It doesn’t intrude in the way that figurative or representational art often does.”11

The more artists and viewers fetishize the work’s pure materiality, the less content seems to be necessary nowadays, and figuration opposed to abstraction to a certain degree is always connected with a meaning. Thus, modern abstract painting and its actual hand-made “thingness” evoke the notion of real objects, which serves as a very immediate and concrete metaphor for creativity and mastery, alluding to distinction and exclusivity, beauty and decoration. In the end, the works function as a sign and marker of classical high-end art in general, combined with a certain high currency or value in particular. Yet, most contemporary young abstract artists still take clear inspiration and cues from the history of abstract painting, but they approach it in a rather bold and unconcerned way. It’s their open eclecticism as well as their lack of awareness and concern in terms of art historical developments that is most criticized. The several self-conscious historic variations and numerous forms of analyzing and deconstructing modern abstraction in the twentieth century were followed by multifarious phases of its accentuation and absolutization, as well as the exclusion and substitution of its materials, techniques, and conditions. This culminated in color and light becoming autonomous art forms particular of the twentyfirst century, as media theorist and Austrian artist Peter Weibel has argued and demonstrated in the Graz exhibition catalog Moderne: Selbstmord der Kunst?. 12 Appropriation, citation and ornamentation, and interpretation and repetition, actually feel as important as they are now revolutionarily seen as a continued form of evolutionary creation and progression—with the copy always considered as an original. No doubt, there is certainly a strong decorative and “voguish” element at play within abstraction at the current—in a double sense. Since, as Peter Weibel pointed out, the forms of abstraction have now fallen from the 11

Gavin, “The Return of Abstract Art.” Moderne: Selbstmord der Kunst?, eds. Peter Weibel, Christa Steinle and Gudrun Danzer (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), published in conjunction with the exhibition Moderne: Selbstmord der Kunst? Im Spiegel der Sammlung der Neuen Galerie Graz, shown at the Neue Galerie Graz am Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria.

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heroic and the sublime simply into the patterns of fashion and decorative ornamentation. Thus, in mass culture as well as in the visual arts (as a result of the bifurcation into abstract and realist art), we see the ubiquitous romanticizing of the banal and the trivial.13 What was formerly considered conceptual and critical is now being turned into bland decoration and highly conceptualized ornamentation within obnoxiously bright and intensely radiating colors, especially in visual merchandising and marketing. Here, abstraction functions as a kind of visual branding, which can be seen in the recent creative cooperation of Louis Vuitton with French conceptual artist Daniel Buren (b. 1938). The abstract artist designed the striking checked staging for the fashion house’s scenographic Spring/Summer 2013 fashion show in Paris.

Figure 15.2. Louis Vuitton, Spring/Summer 2013. Copyright Louis Vuitton.

Buren also collaborated with the leading luxury brand on the accompanying advertising campaign (shot by renowned fashion photographer Steven Meisel), which features that same distinctive checkerboard set design, appropriating the famous Louis Vuitton Damier design in radiant colors (yellow, orange, or green), and Buren’s signature style, his characteristic stripes, that actually were the “stars” of the show and throughout the season’s collection. Paradoxically, abstract art’s 13



Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981.

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historicity thus here became the new avant-garde—le dernier cri in contemporary fashion design (Figure 15.2): “The square and the grid are repeated motifs in Buren’s work while the checks relate to Louis Vuitton‫ތ‬s own geometric Damier pattern,” [Designer Marc] Jacobs says. “Also, Buren’s famous work is in the centre of Paris, the home of Louis Vuitton, which is at the heart of the house today and throughout its history.” For Buren, who has collaborated with Nina Ricci and Hermès, fashion and art make natural bedfellows. “The world of fashion has a very long history of direct collaboration with the art world,” he says. “I believe that for at least 20 years we have been at the very top level of collaboration between these two worlds.” It was the very ephemeral yet public nature of doing a high-profile fashion show that attracted him to the project. “I think of these works as specific exhibitions that could just as well be shown within a museum or a gallery. The difference is that the exposure given by these fashion houses with a worldwide presence is bigger in public reach than any single museum in the world.”14

After discussing some general preliminaries outlining some striking approaches to abstract art in contemporary artistic practices, I finally want to introduce the remarkable abstract work of young German artist and designer Katrin Keller. Since 2006, Katrin Keller (b. 1974 in Dortmund)15 has been creating series of images with different materials and techniques that might best be termed in a dual sense as Neo-geometric Conceptualism, always within bold and bright, dazzling day-glo colors, whose daylight fluorescent pigments resonate with contemporary digital aesthetics and sensual rhetoric. In some respect, of course, the term is best reflective of Peter Halley's work, which already in the 1990s introduced a new type of vibrant geometric painting, which rejected the nonobjective abstraction of the twentieth century. Instead, Halley used figurative source material such as microchips or battery cells. He is also known for fluorescent graphic paintings that explore ideas of electric circuitry and digital systems. NeoGeo also applies to the colorfully vibrant works of Sarah Morris that refer to austere architectural structures and grids despite their specious nonrepresentation and nonobjectiveness. Thus, on the one hand, Katrin Keller’s nonfigurative and nonrelational compositions fit into the long line of abstraction in modern art since Kazimir Malevich, while on the other hand, the young emerging artist also combines 14

Kin Woo, “The Joy of Sets,” Dazed, last accessed April 4, 2015, http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/15567/1/the-joy-of-sets. 15 Katrin Keller’s official website, http://www.katrin-keller.de.



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in her works the non-colors black, white, and gray, as well as luminous dayglo colors, that is, out of a contemporary dazzling palette generated in turn out of the contemporary realm of luminescent neon colors of a digital age and techno-culture. The creative outcome is, what might be described and branded as a quite extraordinary Day Glo Neo Geo—like in Keller’s pretty fashionable series Sweet Dreams of Colors. (Plate 15.1 to 15.2) Since the 1920s, geometric abstract art has been pursued within the Concrete Art movement established by Theo van Doesburg as an exclusively anti-figurative, nonobjective, and autonomous kind of painting. Rather than a subjective, emotive, spiritually, and mystically charged vocabulary of form, as free as it was determined by chance and the process of painting, such as we find in the early abstract compositions of Wassily Kandinsky, this development approached the process of making a work as an utterly rational, objectively controlled, methodical, and frequently also analytical, mathematical-geometric process. Colors and the formative means of geometry, namely figures, volumes, and lines, are not employed as derivative abstract ciphers and signs by which to reproduce a certain response to nature or an interpretation of reality in visual terms. Rather, here they represent objective and concrete means with which to create and construct images within a conceptual process, having works rationally planned from start to finish. This concreteconstructivist art, shaped according to a given, rational logic, operates on the premise of being the artistic representation of purely visual, optical structures, not the expression of subjectively individual sensations or stirrings. Yet it possesses optical effects that fracture and run startlingly athwart that analytical logic. In Katrin Keller’s hands, however, that device materializes in particular in the use and deployment of garishly glowing neon colors, which in contrast to the blacks, grays, and whites she uses, as well as in contrast to the stringent geometric composition, makes again and again for extremely sensual moments in the unfolding of their perception and sensual experience. Colors irradiate and color reflections break the strict, cool factuality of the painting objects and have the concrete, geometrygoverned picture grow on the viewer’s senses as a multifaceted visual event of individual perception and experience. Katrin Keller’s serial abstract paintings thus also reflect on and recur to artistic currents such as twentieth century color-field and hard-edge painting, for which her fascinating analytical, material, and visual pictorial constructions can be read as returning both to optical and illusionistic pictorial effects. Their perceptual and sensory realities are founded preeminently upon the knowledge and virtuous demonstration of clear



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pictorial composition aiming at specific color effects—the virtual sensory events, for example, of color stimuli, energy, and contrasts, of gradations of color saturation and complementary or simultaneous contrasts. To that extent, Katrin Keller’s exemplary cycles of abstract work in neon colors emerge as a deliberate artistic and creative activity that is the spark for an infinite succession of new, diverse perceptual, and experiential processes on the part of the viewers—without the works themselves forfeiting their status of original and autonomous art objects. At the fore of the perception of this fluorescent neo-geometric art is simply the sensual experience and adventure of colors, visibly applied on pure or multi-layered materials. Embedded in pictorial structures and grids of clearly articulated geometry, the colors simultaneously irradiate and subtly break open the dimensions of that material framework with opticalkinetic shimmering effects, or with a new glowing voluminosity, for example, that alludes to our digital era. Last, but not least, the contemporary Day Glo Neo Geo series, in refreshing abstraction, can be characterized and highlighted as exemplary metareferential painting, since they not only cite the historic Neo-Geo period of the late 1980s in particular and the heritage of twentieth century abstraction in general, but remind us sensually that an abstract painting today is simply not born of the same techniques, motivations, and intentions as one from almost one hundred years ago now, as Robert Nickas already pointed out in his opulent volume Painting Abstraction: The unfolding of history and its subsequent rupture have seen to that. Even works painted contemporaneously are not necessarily parallel in terms of intentionality; they are merely made in temporal proximity to each other. But there is one thing of which we can be sure: all works of art come from the facts of everyday life, from the texture of lived experience. And so the question of persistence—in recent years resulting in an abundance of abtract-type painting—would have to be formulated as: which aspects of everyday compel an artist to make an abstract painting rather than a work of any other kind?16

The answers may be various and manifold here. Yet, considering the significant Metareferential Turn in postmodernism and contemporary

16

Robert Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon, 2009), 7.



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posthistoire culture,17 one might conclude that all new abstraction today, despite of its enormous variety and diversity—some more intelligent and convincing, some less—on the whole has to be seen as self-conscious abstract works on abstraction. Hence, one possible description and explanation of the so-called “Return of Abstraction” (has it ever really been away since its invention and origin?) considered in a broader global perspective and culturalhistorical context, is that contemporary art in general has gone meta to an unprecedented extent today. New abstraction on (historic) abstraction, thus, is being part of a remarkable “metaculture” in general that has emerged since the proclaimed end of modernism in Western culture and refers to that post-historical state of an “a-temporality” mentioned above. Indeed, according to Werner Wolf, the phenomenon of “metareference,” i.e. self-conscious and self-reflexive comments on, or explicit or implicit references to various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact, object or performance, specific media and arts, or the media in general, is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in “high” art and literature as frequently as in their pop-cultural counterparts, in the traditional arts and media, as well as in global new media and our current digital culture. Abstraction is being constantly refreshed and sold by younger artists like Katrin Keller today, each in his or her own subjective signature style that has been individually cultivated in the academic system of our art schools and universities, and thus gaining a kind of ahistorical timelessness that might be condemned by leading art critics like Jerry Saltz, but in fact is exactly what defines a contemporary global culture, in which everything converges into posthistorical or rather atemporal entropy. Indeed, historic abstraction—like a zombie—is dead, but constantly re-animated by a younger generation of magic artists. In the end, great (i.e. dead!) masters of art history like Theo van Doesburg still seem to give a timeless inspiration and eternal motivation to even these industrious young “metaabstract art” producers for an international art market, since even the contemporary, “i.e. conscious artist, has a two-fold vocation. In the first place to create the purely visual work of art; in the second place to make the public susceptible to the beauty of pure visual art.”18 17

Werner Wolf, ed., The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. Forms, Functions, and Attempts at Explanation. Studies in Intermediality No. 5 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 18 H. L. C. Jaffé, De Stijl 1917–1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1956), 93.





CONTRIBUTORS

Nieves Acedo is a lecturer in Theory of Art and director of the Master’s program in Art Business at Nebrija University in Madrid, Spain. Her research primarily focuses on the study of the American action painter William Congdon. As part of the Nebrija University research group ETCC, she participates in the “Art and Science” research program, investigating light as an artistic material. Wiebke Gronemeyer is a curator and researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. In 2015 she received her Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a thesis titled “The Curatorial Complex: Social Dimensions of Knowledge Production.” She is a research associate at Jacobs University, Bremen. Information about her research and curatorial practice can be found at www.wiebkegronemeyer.de. Naomi Hume is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Seattle University. She specializes in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central European art and visual culture. She is particularly interested in the work of artists who borrowed and adapted French visual vocabularies to serve their own social, national, and political purposes. Her work has been published in international journals including Slavic Review, Umeni/Art, and Centropa. Wendy Kelly is a practicing artist who has shown her works in many solo shows in Australia and Europe and participated in curated exhibitions. She received a Ph.D. from Monash University (2010), researching abstraction, its evolution, development, and role in contemporary art and visual culture. Her interest in current abstract practice continues to inform her artistic work. Elena Korowin is a lecturer at the University for Arts and Design in Karlsruhe. She has also worked as a curatorial assistant at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden–Baden and the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg and presented lectures at international symposia. Currently, she is a fellow of the Brigitte–Schlieben–Lange Program pursuing her postdoctoral research.

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Rose-Carol Washton Long, Resident Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Art History, City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of books on Kandinsky and Expressionism. She has co-authored books on Max Beckmann and Jewish dimensions of modernism, and published essays on August Sander and Lucia Moholy. Marilyn Martin (BA (Hons) UNISA; MArch, University of the Witwatersrand) has worked as an independent writer, curator, and lecturer since her retirement as director of the South African National Gallery in 2008. She is a senior scholar at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. In 2001, Martin was received into the Legion of Honour, Republic of France at the rank of Officer. Birgit Mersmann is Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art/Aesthetic Theory at the University of Cologne, Germany, and associated Research Professor at the NCCR “Iconic Criticism” at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research foci include image and media theory, visual cultures, contemporary East Asian and Western art, global art history, the history of Asian biennials, visual translation, and interrelations between script and image. Gordon Monro is an Australian digital media artist, whose works include digital prints, abstract videos, and computer-based installations. He describes himself as a generative artist: much of his practice consists of writing computer programs that generate part or all of an artwork. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at Monash University in Melbourne, working in generative art. Franziska Müller is a curatorial associate at the Potsdam Museum, focusing on art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has worked on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and photography. While completing her Ph.D. in Art History and Literary Studies, she was a junior lecturer at Europa-University Viadrina. Her Ph.D. thesis on Ernst Wilhelm Nays’s book Vom Gestaltwert der Farbe will be published in 2016. Aarnoud Rommens is BeIPD–COFUND Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Liège. His book Joaquín Torres–García: Constructive Universalism and the Inversion of Abstraction (Routledge) will be published shortly, while Antropofagia: Avant-Garde Emblematics (Brill) is also forthcoming. He is editor of the publication Comics and Abstraction:



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Narrative by Other Means (PULg) and writes about the graphic novel, digital humanities, and the Latin American avant-garde. Viktoria Schindler, born in Lithuania, studied German philology at Vilnius University, Public Administration and Law at Mykolas Romeris University, and Art History at Free University, Berlin. Since 2012, she has been working on her Ph.D. thesis on the Russian avant-garde art, which is supervised by Prof. Werner Busch and supported by a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Dorothea Schöne is a Berlin-based art historian, curator, and writer with a particular focus on postwar modernism. She studied at Leibniz College in Tübingen, the University of Leipzig, and the University of California at Riverside. As a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she worked on the exhibition Art of Two Germanys—Cold War Cultures (2009–10). In 2014, she was appointed director of the Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin. Pamela C. Scorzin, born in Vicenza (Italy), is an art, design, and media theorist. She received a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University and is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Design at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles and Milan. Isabel Wünsche is Professor of Art and Art History at Jacobs University, Bremen. She specializes in European modernism, the avant-garde movements, and abstract art. Her book publications include Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924–1945 (Benteli, 2006), Biocentrism and Modernism (with Oliver A.I. Botar, Ashgate, 2011), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (with Paul Crowther, Routledge, 2012) und The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2015).