"Inventing Abstraction' at the Museum of Modern Art

What makes a pictorial representation "real"?

In painting, you start off with a canvas or a wall that compels you to put the three dimensions of our sensory experience into two. Modeling and perspective give the impression of three dimensions, but that's a cheat, just as photography is. Every artistic or scientific representation of the "real" fakes it one way or another, and the goal of fidelity per se to a prescriptive reality presumes that the human sensorium is its proper standard.

Wrong again: as Schopenhauer pointed out, all perception itself is merely representation.

The quite banal goal of trying to replicate sensory representation with the greatest possible exactitude— the goal that goes by the generic name of "realism"— is actually a short-lived experiment in the history of art. Titian's flesh tones are a wonder, but he understood that he was using them to produce an idealized effect; no actual woman looked like his Venus.

(Think of Norma Jean having to wake up every day to be Marilyn Monroe. No wonder the poor kid took the pills.)

Perception as snapshots

The true goal of art, of course, is transcendent; it begins with the world we all notionally share and takes off from there. What began to happen in the later 19th Century and climaxed in the early 20th was a loosening of the spatio-temporal grid that organized sensory perception as artists, philosophers, scientists and mathematicians converged on the notion of a world without fixed points of reference in which entities could only be described relationally, not essentially.

In practical terms, this meant that what our perceptions gave us, and indeed our thought itself, was a picture of the world, and not— if the phrase could even have meaning— the world itself.

The French Impressionists began this process in the fine arts. If we think of normal perception as a series of snapshots separated by the reflex of the eye blink— constructing our normally "stable" picture of phenomena as a succession of very short takes— the Impressionists introduced a kind of time-lapse to better incorporate the sense of motion and change.

Psychological motion

This innovation was clearly related to technical developments in photography. Pointillists like Seurat seized upon another aspect of pictographic reproduction— the dot-image— to construct frieze-like works that seemed to stabilize reality while at the same time indicating the tiny, perpetually oscillating units of which perception was composed.

Painters in both schools were fascinated by optics, and this fascination led them to experiment with color. This development, crossed with the work of the new Expressionists of central and northern Europe, resulted in the schools that emerged in rapid succession in the early 20th Century: Fauvism, Cubism and Abstraction.

The Expressionists, led by Van Gogh and Munch, were interested more in psychological than physical motion, using the latter as tokens of the former. The result was a complete breakup of the normally constituted objects of the visual field.

Freedom of gesture

The Classicizing wing of this general movement (first represented by Picasso and Braque) broke up sense objects into primary— sometimes overlapping— geometric forms. The Romantic wing (led by Kandinsky) went further, resolving the act of painting into free gesture.

We tend to concentrate on the major figures of the movement, or to pigeonhole the offshoots by the various names they adopted— Futurism, Rayism, Suprematism, etc.— and focus on these separately. To its great credit, "Inventing Abstraction," the large and comprehensive show of first-generation abstract art, surveys the development and spread of abstraction across Europe and the U.S. in the period just before and after World War I.

Such a show has been needed for a long time, and this one not only offers the viewer a look at much unfamiliar work of value (a good part of it from the Museum of Modern Art's own deep vaults), but conveys for the first time an adequate sense of the scope and excitement of the movement toward abstraction as it swept— and permanently transformed— Western art.

Picasso's bottles

The show begins with a 1910 Cubist sketch by Picasso, who interestingly remarked, "There is no abstract art." Cubism, as practiced by Picasso and Braque even in its first and most severe "analytic" phase, deconstructed but never dispensed with ordinary sense objects (bottles, guitars, nudes); indeed, the titles of these works always referred to them.

The featured Picasso on exhibit, the display note asserts, is the closest the artist ever came to completely free, nonrepresentational abstraction, although it seemed no more so to me than many other Picassos. In the end, Picasso's art was grounded in sense experience, and devoted to celebrating it. For the later Picasso and Braque, indeed, Cubism became just another means of representation.

Others, however, took Cubism in the direction of geometrical abstraction— for example, Francis Picabia in "La Source" (1912), a central work of the exhibit. Geometrical forms, rarely found in a pure state in nature, provided a ready-made language for abstraction— and, since they weren't tied to representation, they could be freely abridged, distended or combined to form almost inexhaustibly new patterns of form and color.

Free-floating landscapes

This was tremendously liberating. Western art had been mimetic for millennia, and expression had been governed by its canons; now, the artist was free to express himself directly and according to his own fancy.

Kandinsky's lyric, gestural abstraction— free-floating lines and fluid clusters— developed around the same time, and just as one could see residual representational elements slowly devolving into geometrized patterns in the works that took off from Cubism, so Kandinsky's Expressionist landscapes seem to be partly ingested, and at last disappeared entirely from his canvases.

These works retain an extraordinary expressive power, and Kandinsky accompanied them by a number of texts and treatises, of which the best known is On the Spiritual in Art. He knew he was charting unexplored territory, for whereas the geometric abstractionists could at least count on a language of recognized forms— circle, cylinder, square— Kandinsky was painting, as no one before him had, from the inside out.

The image urge

As it turned out, that experiment lasted only a few years. Within a decade, Kandinsky had shifted to hard-edged geometric abstraction, a style he pursued for the rest of his life. The Surrealists picked up some of his earlier abstract idiom, but it was not until the rise of the New York School in the late 1940s that lyric abstraction found new takers, and a new master in Jackson Pollock.

Significantly, Pollock's own gestural period was brief; images had reappeared in his work as early as 1952, and as his rigorously committed colleague Philip Guston was forced to admit, the compulsion to create images was inescapable. All art, finally, was a dialogue with the world of sight and touch.

MoMA's show is organized by national schools: principally those of France, England, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands and the U.S., with representatives from the newly formed or revived states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Formalism was the popular approach to abstraction in the Netherlands and dynamism in Italy, but the impression is of great ferment, excitement and eager experimentation everywhere.

Pictures about "'nothing'

The Abstract Expressionist movement both drew from and spilled over into literature, theater, ballet, photography and film; Apollinaire and Schoenberg were as critical to it as, say, Kandinsky and Mondrian. Altogether and in its most comprehensive sense, it constituted the revolution called Modernism; Einstein was part of it too, and so was Wittgenstein.

But the mainspring was artistic abstraction, if for no other reason than that pictures about "nothing" were more overtly shocking than atonal music or calligraphic poetry— it was as if the world had been removed, and chaos inserted in its place.

That of course wasn't the case: We can now see how obsessively ordered much of abstract art was. Revolutionaries are, in the end, the ultimate conservatives.

Today's choice

But the climate of experiment and discovery was real, and the sense of a fundamental liberation from ancient strictures was no illusion. Abstraction did not replace representation, as some of its acolytes thought it would, but it did settle down beside it, and the two languages would establish a lively and invigorating commerce.

Lately, "neo-abstraction" has enjoyed something of a vogue, and an artist like Gerhard Richter can move as un-self-consciously between radically abstract and mimetic idioms as a Sunday painter choosing this color or that from his palette. Whether that is a healthy eclecticism or a symptom of decadence is for each viewer to judge; what is incontestable is that abstraction has vastly extended the range of art, and has become one of its permanent resources.