Irving Lavin : The Crisis of Art History

 

What would you like to get from reading a book of art history?

The  word "context" could cover most of it:  social, political, religious, philosophical, cultural, technological, biographical.

But at the center - there has has to be art worth caring about - and a sense that the writer cares about it for the right reasons and  not just because it’s really famous.  

What are those right reasons?  Good luck trying to explain them — but most of us find our own reasons to be sufficiently important.  If a writer’s preferences and reasons seem incomprehensible - why care about how they contextualize ?

And so we come to this brief essay by a well spoken art historian who bemoans the changing conceptual foundations of his field and takes a moment to articulate his own.

I look forward to reading one of Lavin’s books about Bernini some day

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The Crisis in Art History from the Art Bulletin LXXIII, 1996 

Irving Lavin (1927-2019)

 When I started out, theory still had its classic sense of an abstract structure in which individual phenomena might be accorded a reasonably explicable place, and within the parameters of which an evolutionary process might be discerned without value judgments or any other form of tendentious manipulation. Theory now has a very different meaning, of which tendentiousness has become, unabashedly, the very trademark. The revision has been progressive, passing through a sometimes bewildering series of more or less interrelated ideologies, from Marxism to multiculturalism. Marxism had prewar roots, but many of those who espoused Marxism in the twenties and thirties (most notably, in our field, Meyer Schapiro) became disenchanted when confronted by the brutally repressive realities of Stalinism and dictatorship by the proletariat. The later neo-Marxists ignored, rationalized, or sublimated these contradictions, producing, instead, an art history that chronicled, explicitly or implicitly, the brutally exploitative realities of capitalist culture, culminating in that Evil Empire of the West, the great citadel of consumerist vulgarity, the United States of America. The subsequent flood of interpretive "strategies" (to co-opt a usage normally applied to the artist, but now increasingly to the historian as well)-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, symbolic anthropology, patronage, rhetoric (which includes not only the devices the artist employs on behalf of his work, but also those he deploys on behalf of himself, collective social history (mentalilés), microhistory, new historicism, cultural studies, critical theory, reception theory, feminism, queer studies, multical-turalism-has enriched the field beyond measure. Besides attesting to the intellectual and social ferment of our time, each development has broadened the perspective from which works of art may be viewed with profit (rarely with pleasure), revealing unsuspected facets of meaning and value. Not only has the discipline been greatly expanded; it has also in turn become accessible to scholars throughout the humanities_-historians, philosphers, anthropologists, sociologists, literary historians, musicologists_-for whom art has now become to an unprecedented degree an integral part, if not the main subject, of their study. But these acquisitions have have not been made without cost. One counterproductive effect, ironically, has been attendant upon the emergence of theory itself as a field of specialization, with vocabulary and syntax often quite inaccessible even to professionals, never mind the general public with whom Ackerman was so preoccupied. 

An almost non-tendentious way of putting things.  The field was enriched by all these "strategies" - though  at the same time it’s vocabulary became incomprehensible to non-specialist readers.

Lavin politely deplores that Aesthetics/connoisseurship has been driven  from academic art history - but it was always marginal anyway - wasn’t it?  It does not lend itself to the disciplined explanations required by academic study.  This is why aesthetic proofs of authenticity (is this really a Rembrandt?) are always problematic. (and why so many hopelessly bad pieces have been accepted into the canon)

Devisualization/Hypercontextualization 

Disparate as were the individual approaches of the pioneers who built the conceptual framework of art history, they shared a common purpose. They were intent upon establishing the autonomy of visual experience, the basic premises from which the nature of works of art could be grasped in purely formal terms. They were by no means unaware or unheedful of other factors that condition artistic creation, but other factors are not unique to art history, whose autonomy as a discipline ultimately rests on its capacity to comprehend works of visual art on sight, as it were.' The focus of theory has since been inverted to the point that two of its original mainstays, the analysis and history of style as such, and connoisseurship (localization, dating, and attributoon), have all but disappeared from the art historian's ken.
Attention has shifted almost entirely to the circumstances under which art is created--social, economic, political, and psychological factors are the suspects usually rounded up--so that the visual taxonomy of art has become a lost art. Perhaps inevitably, art history has itself been subjected to the same process with the fetishization of "interdisciplinary approaches" that have effectively reversed its position of leadership in the humanities. The interest and value of art-historical studies are now determined almost in direct relation to the methods and terminology they display that have been appropriated from elsewhere. 

Sign me up for "the autonomy of the visual experience" ! It suggests that there may always be something there that the eye has yet to discover.  Also for the autonomy of reading literature and listening to music.  Let  these things speak for themselves - unfiltered by reductive  commentary.

But can anything really be "grasped in purely formal terms"?   Formal terms seem so inadequate - at least regarding my experience of things. And  it’s  only a few recent artists  or their patrons who would make such a claim about what they made or bought. My own reaction is primarily emotional.    How does the thing make me feel?  

 And how important, really, is a taxonomy of styles?  The same style is shared by every great artist and his legion of followers — but the  qualities that make that master endlessly interesting are not.

So I am really no closer to the "pioneers who built the conceptual framework of art history" than I am to the anti-aesthetic revisionists.

 
Instrumentalization

A concomitant of the devisualization/ hypercontextualization process has been the tendency to regard the work of art primarily as a response to the external circumstances of its creation, and finally as an effort to manipulate them. The artist is no longer thought of as expressing himself but as representing (read promoting) himself, and the art historian has become a kind of voyeur who "sees" the reality behind the façade. The work of art becomes an instrument designed to achieve success and power for the patron (buyer) or the artist, or both. The attitude has its proximate derivation in aspects of symbolic anthropology, in which artifacts (including social practices, also called rituals) are endowed with the affective aura of fetishes to effect a willing acceptance of a given social order. The motivation for this view is fundamentally political, and the key to the strategy is the notion of "empowerment," which thereby acquires a fetishistic aura of its own. The whole mechanism can be ratcheted up, or down, a notch and applied to the historian himself, so that now the agenda of the metahistorian is concealed beneath his own self-representation as an "authentic" voyeur of his colleagues, past and sometimes present. Reality vanishes in a concentric sequence of colorful but ultimately empty Russian dolls. In view of all these developments it might be said with some justice, I think, that the present crisis of art history is that it is no longer itself. Art history has lost its identity. A Natural Science of the Spirit.  How the field will survive these assaults on its integrity remains to be seen, but it surely must, and on the chance it might be helpful I conclude by repeating here the principles of a sort of professional credo of my own. They are excerpted from a rumination, much aware of Ackerman's, written in response to an invitation from Lucy Freeman Sandler, then president of CAA, to address the convocation at the annual meeting in 1983.5 The credo consists of five tenets--I call them assumptions because I doubt whether in the long run any of them is demonstrably valid or invalid_-underlying my conception of art history, which I defined as a "natural science of the spirit."

Does art  history  have to be called "a natural science of the spirit" if it prioritizes the autonomy of the visual experience?  "Human nature" has become ever more problematic as human cognition is studied as a social construct.

But isn’t every statement about either nature or society insufficient?  As Lao Tse once asserted, whatever you can say about the Tao (the totality of the way things are) is wrong.

Notions about nature seem to have a greater toleration for the inexplicable - and at least for me - that includes the greatness of the  artworks that interest me.

So go ahead and call it a natural science - as long as we accept that just as in quantum physics, ultimately, it may never be understandable.

 Assumption 1: Anything manmade is a work of art, even the lowliest and most purely functional object. Man, indeed, might be defined as the art-making animal, and the fact that we choose to regard only some manmade things as works of art is a matter of conditioning. Our conventions in this respect are themselves, in a manner of speaking, works of art.

But who cares about the merely functional stuff - outside of whatever you need to know about how it is made, sold, or used?  A crowbar or brick has little to do with a "natural science of the spirit" - nor would it  concern the pioneers of art history.  It sounds like Lavin has joined the academic movement away from elitist art and towards ‘visual culture".

 Assumption 2: Everything in a work of art was intended by its creator to be there. A work of art represents a series of choices and is therefore a totally deliberate thing--no matter how unpremeditated it may seem, and even when "accidents" are built into it deliberately. We can never be sure that the artist did not know what he was doing or that he wanted to do something other than what he did even when he declares himself dissatisfied with his creation.

I like this one.  Art historians should begin with this assumption until it’s proven wrong - even if it’s something you can’t stand looking at.  

 Assumption 3: Every work of art is a self contained whole. It includes within itself everything necessary for its own decipherment. Information gathered from outside the work may be useful, but it is not essential to the decipherment. On the other hand, outside information (which includes information from or about the artist himself) is essential if we want to explain how the work came to have its particular form and meaning.

I would modify that first sentence to read "every work of art is a self contained whole if it feels that way. The viewer’s capacity for comprehension is critical - and with so much to look at (even more for Lavin’s "everything man made") initial feeling must serve as the gate keeper.

Lavin does not mention it - but an important corollary would be that your visual experience trumps whatever has been written about it — even if by the artist himself.

 Assumption 4: Every work of art is an absolute statement. It conveys as much as possible with as little as possible. The work of art is one hundred percent efficient, and to paraphrase Leon Battista Alberti's classic definition of Beauty, nothing could be added, taken away, or altered without changing its message. Alberti was referring simply to the relationship among the parts, whereas I mean to include the very substance of the work itself. 

Thus seems to be a restatement of Assumption #3 - and I have the same problem with it.

Assumption 5: Every work of art is a unique statement. It says something that has never been said before and will never be said again, by the artist himself or anyone else. Copies or imitations, insofar as they are recognizable as such, are no exception, since no man can quite suppress his individuality, no matter how hard he may try. Conversely, no matter how original he is, the artist to some extent reflects the work of others, and it is purely a matter of convention that we tend to evaluate works of art by the degree of difference from their models. 

An interesting twist here.  If you can recognize something is a copy - then it’s unique.  If you can’t - you still have to call it unique even though you may be  wrong.  But what if documentary evidence proves it’s a copy even though you cannot visually distinguish it from the original?  This is more of a marketplace issue than an aesthetic one. But it would be important to historians trying to build a history of styles.  

As a museum goer, I do like to know if something (like a Roman statue) is a copy (of a Greek original).

And I do not believe that evaluation by "degree of difference from their models" is entirely conventional.  Yes - it is more important for Europeans than Chinese.  But still — there is a special thrill about something that is both attractive and very, very different from everything else.

 
The chief virtue of these assumptions is that they help to assure each human creation its due. What it is due may be defined as the discovery of the reciprocity it embodies between expressive form and content.

Yes - give each human creation it’s due.   For me - that means letting it speak for itself  (for as long as I want to listen).  But I have zero interest in the reciprocity of form and content - unless the form compels that interest.  And I suspect Lavin feels the same way — it’s just that professional art historians are not supposed to blatantly promulgate their own taste.  After all —- he does specialize in Bernini - not the monster dolls sold in Walmart.

 I do not pretend that my own work has ever met the criteria implicit in any of my assumptions. Yet they are much more to me than philosophical abstractions. They represent the obscure but persistent demons that prod me to think about a work in the first place. And, once the process begins, they are intellectual pangs of conscience that lead me to mistrust distinctions between conscious and unconscious creativity, between mechanical and conceptual function, between the artist's goal and his achievement. Finally, they are what drive me from the work itself into archives, libraries, and classrooms, in search of Illumination.

Perhaps those like me who own and proclaim personal taste could never have a career in academic art history today - but still - I’d like to see someone try.

Like any other human ability - if you don’t really focus on cultivating taste, it’s not likely to improve.

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 Paul Crowther is a philosopher, not an historian, so perhaps he can be more unconventional. He is certainly way outside current academic norms in the field of aesthetics — and it’s only by happenstance that I came across him:

 The Kantian and Hegelian traditions – in their different ways, each saw historical factors as partially constitutive of artistic meaning; whilst the great tradition of German art history from Riegl to the early Panofsky fully understood that art historical change centred on issues of aesthetic transformation. The reciprocal dependence of art historical and aesthetic significance was here acknowledged by both schools, even if not fully understood. The importance of this insight has long been forgotten. In fact, recent developments in art history and aesthetics actively suppress it. In this little discussion I shall consider some of its ramifications mainly in relation to the limitations of contemporary art history. A first problem arises from an influential consumerist mind set whose major manifestation is a (putatively) ‘anti-foundational’ cultural relativism. This derives, in large part, from an unquestioning acceptance of the self-contradictory discourses of Foucault, Derrida, and the like 

1. Such relativism has distorted both art practice and the interpretative discourses consequent upon such practice. More specifically it has reversed the order of dependence between these so that art practice is now understood primarily as a vehicle for the reflection of modes of reception and theory rather than as a mode of making. This reversal is also consolidated by the contentious supposition that Duchamp’s ready-mades centre on the creation of something artistically different, rather than something different from art. A supposition of this kind is tacitly racist to the profoundest degree (as well as being conceptually flawed)

 2. The reason why is that whilst, for many thousands of years (and across many cultural boundaries), art has been bound up with the making of aesthetically significant images and forms, the Duchamp precedent seems to demand a redefinition. Rather than being acknowledged as – at best a marginal western art-critical strategy – it is seen as the paradigmatic art-creation activity in relation to which all else should be understood. The primacy of making is dismissed with a condescending sneer, or worse. Art per se is taken to amount to little more than ideas, theories, and their contexts of occurrence. The dominant contextualist modes of recent art history 

3, in particular have internalized this view with dogmatic insistency. They reduce artistic meaning to factors bound up with the image’s documentary and persuasive effects, and the social and other contextual elements which enable these. Apart from the occasional discussion of technique and artists’ materials, such approaches are overwhelmingly consumer and context orientated

Yes - the triumph of the consumer model was when art museums, like the Art Institute of Chicago stopped curating their own annual exhibits of the best in American or local art, and just let the market decide what was worth showing.

You might call this a phenomenological approach. 

I’m looking forward to reading one of Crowther’s  many books.

Eldredge: Nature Symbolized - American Painting Ryder to Hartley

 

Arthur Dove, Abstraction #2, 1910 

Wow.

Eldredge starts off with four of what could be the very first non-objective paintings in the history of American art - and as it turns out, only one can be found online today - and it does not disappoint. 

The above seems sui  generis. The closest I can think of is Van Gogh - but that’s not very close. His subject is light on a flat painted surface — not sunflowers or bedrooms.

American abstract painting started off with a bang. Arthur Dove had his own strong, luminous voice, and apparently he was painting only to please himself

When Arthur Dove brushed his first series of abstractions in 1910, he assumed a pioneering position among nonobjective artists. At the same time, he continued a distinguished American tradition of imagery reliant upon landscape or natural inspiration. Dove's accomplishment embodies the paradoxical marriage of innovation and tradition in the genesis of abstract art in America, a union that fired the creativity of inventive painters in the early years of this century, yet whose roots were firmly planted in nineteenth-century imagination. Janus-like, these pioneers greeted the new era with a novel artistic language while reflecting the philosophical precepts of their forebears. Until recently critics and historians paid attention almost exclusively to formal innovations in commenting on these artists' works; belatedly their ties to idealist thought and imagery, particularly transcendentalism, have been stressed in critical discussions. In fact, the significance of the work derives from the painters' abilities to wed their concerns for artistic form and subjective content. 

One might expect the first abstract painters in America would have been looking backward at the same time they were looking forward. - but I just don’t see Dove looking anywhere but at his canvas and applying paint until he got the excitement he wanted.

 Until recently critics and historians paid attention almost exclusively to formal innovations in commenting on these artists' works; belatedly their ties to idealist thought and imagery, particularly transcendentalism, have been stressed in critical discussions. In fact, the significance of the work derives from the painters' abilities to wed their concerns for artistic form and subjective content.

We will have to read further to see if Eldredge thinks that any subjective content is notably spiritual - or compelling in any other way.
 

Albert Pinkham Ryder,  Moonlit Cove, 1880-90,  14 x 17

In Moonlight Cove, 1880-90 Ryder arranged masses of dark color in an illusion of three-dimensional space that at the same time adheres closely to the flat plane of the canvas. While the spatial recession in Dove's Abstraction No. 4 is more ambiguous, its layers of heavily brushed earthen and vegetal forms within a shallow space suggest strong affinities with Ryder’s  painting.

Regretfully, only Dove’s Abstraction No. 2 can be found online - and comparing it with the piece above is like comparing day to night (or sun to moon).  And Ryder is imagining a place for you to visit — while the only place Dove  would have you visit is the canvas itself.

Albert Pinkham Ryder is customarily cited as the exemplar of this introspective mood in American painting of the turn of the century. His reputation as a figure apart, a reclusive visionary outside the mainstream, has lately been modified by studies that place the artist in community and in context. ' Nevertheless, Ryder's imaginative compositions, often based upon literary or musical inspirations, have none of the slavish fidelity to details nor optical plays with daylight and color found in the work of many of his contemporaries. While they mimicked the observable world, Ryder sought other ends. As his friend Elliott Daingerfield recalled, "Fact did not interest him - truth and beauty did. " In a rare discussion of his work Ryder admonished: "The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. . . . The artist has only to remain true to his dream and . . . must see naught but the vision beyond. "To describe the quest for that vision Ryder chose an unconventional simile: "Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing. "It was probably Ryder's risk taking as much as the large forms and vital rhythms of his compositions that led Jackson Pollock to admire him as "the only American master who interests me. "

John Frederick Kensett,  Lake  George, 1870, 14 x 24"

"Truth and beauty" instead of fact and detail?  The same might be said of this piece done twenty years earlier.

Howard Pyle, Once it Chased Dr. Wilkerson into the very town itself", 1909 

Perhaps I would feel differently about the actual paintings - but these online images suggest that this contemporary piece has all the virtues of the Ryder piece - and then some.

Ryder, Death on a Pale Horse, 1900

This figurative piece would better compare with Howard Pyle - though, in person, it probably has painterly effects that magazine illustrators, like Pyle, we’re not aiming for. 

 I saw nature springing into life upon my canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation. —— Albert Pinkham Ryder

That does, however, sound like something Arthur Dove might have said

Ryder's transcendence of "sharp outlines and colored surfaces" as he sought expression of thought, of the "vision beyond," is akin to Emersonian practice. And his coltish romp through sunset fields after he saw nature spring into life suggests that, like Emerson, he had gained one of the "best moments of life." Likewise Dove's 1910 paintings are abstractions of organic process, visions of cause and spirit rather than outline and surface. They are an extension of Ryder's aesthetics and Emerson's faith, siting creative inspiration in the spiritual experience of the natural world. Both painters would likely have concurred with Emerson's estimation that "the greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. "

The Emerson quote is cute and clever - but doesn’t he exemplify an intellectual rather than spiritual approach?  If Dove wrote about spirituality in his art, wouldn’t Eldredge have shared it?  Dove seems to be the round peg getting thoroughly pounded into the square hole.  I will ignore the other literary luminaries whom Eldredge references.

Cezanne, Apples, Pear, and Quince, 1885-7

Dove’s piece appears much closer to Cezanne than Ryder,

Brightness, frontality, short brush strokes, patches of color.

Who has ever suggested that Cezanne was "symbolizing nature"?

Marsden Hartley, Abstraction #1, 1913, 39 x 31

A few months later he catalogued other influences, which comprehended "a universal essence - I came to it by way of James' pragmatism - slight touches of Bergson - and directly through the fragments of mysticism that I have found out of Böhme - Eckhart, Tauler - Suso - and the Bhagavad Gita. " Having absorbed these varied influences and guided by his unconscious, Hartley created during his first year in Paris (1912-13) a series of lyrical abstractions in which a loosened Cubist structure is scattered with calligraphic lines and occasional mystic symbols. The investment of self in these works individualized them; as Hartley wrote to Stieglitz, quoting the Symbolist Redon: "I have made an art after myself." Hartley had hoped to create a spiritual art that would suggest the universal and transcend specific meaning. He was disappointed when an occultist visitor read them literally and observed, "You have no idea what you are doing - these pictures are full of Kabbalistic signs and symbols. "   For Hartley the goal was not an occult cryptogram, but a suggestion of the spiritual perceived through the self. He took pains to distinguish his approach, which was rooted in American experience, from the mystic symbols used by his European. contemporaries and congratulated himself that previously no one has presented just this aspect in modern tendency - Kandinsky is theosophic - Marc is extremely psychic in his rendering of the soul life of animals. . .. I could never be French. I could never become German - I shall always remain the American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Arthur B. Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes [of about 1909, which]. .. were so expressive of my nature - and its the same element I am returning to now with tremendous increase of power through experience.

Yes — Hartley’s paintings, like the above, are indeed "the suggestion of the spiritual perceived through the self".  Eldredge has put it quite succinctly. The self, however, might be considered more like an obstacle  than a lens in the pursuit of spirituality.

The priest and Levite walk past the injured man,

Good Samaritan windows, Chartres, 1205-1215

The jagged black lines in the Marsden painting recall the lead strips in medieval glass windows, and overall, he seems to be using a similar visual vocabulary. Might we then compare private/non-objective  versus public/figurative spirituality ? 

I find the Gothic  image much more compelling.  It’s so deliciously ironic  - with the floating, and useless, servants of God who flank the suffering, and sinking, injured man.

But the age of great cathedrals was long, long gone by the time of Hartley — and now  artists could only speak for themselves - and  Hartley does so quite well.

Marsden Hartley, Painting #48, 47 x 47", 1913

This one is even more intense and visionary.

Marsden Hartley, Pre-War Pageant, 1913,   49 x 31

The painter claimed that "there is no hidden symbolism whatsoever in them," yet many of his Berlin paintings (for example, Painting No. 48, Berlin and Pre-War Pageant , both 1913), seem loaded with symbolic meaning, especially those that present complex emblematic portraits of Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, his friend who was killed in action in October 1914.» The symbolic content of Hartley's Berlin paintings is conveyed through such Signs as the mystical figure eight, with its Occult implications of physical or spiritual regeneration, or the Iron Cross, with its references to Christian and Prussian sacrifice: through such symbolic forms as the Christian mandorla and Kandinsky's spiritual triangle: and through bright, allusive color, including martyr's red, the "painful shrillness" of Ellow's "disturbing influence," and celestial blues, which Kandinsky had identified as "the Typical heavenly color. with} a call to the infinite, a desire for purity and transcendence."

With strong color and wavy line,  this piece might work well as a tapestry.

Konrad Cramer, 1919

Konrad Cramer, Abstraction, 1914

One of the artists moved by the exhibition was Konrad Cramer, a frequent visitor (although never an exhibitor) at the "291" gallery, who enjoyed the distinction of having known the work of the German avant-garde prior to emigrating to New York in 1911. Cramer's debt to Kandinsky was evident in the abstractions he began shortly after his arrival in this country, including his Improvisations series painted in 1912- Hartley's influence was to add momentum to Cramer's own search for an abstract visual language. 

 

 Can art be spiritual to others if it is not appealing ?  There is no mystery here that I want to pursue.

 

 

Regretfully, no color reproduction can be found for this piece.

A Cramer abstraction of about 1914   (Shown above) composed around an emphatic orange peak, seems to derive from Hartley's The Warriors, 1913. The embracing foreground figures and the conjoined emblems of male and female within the central orange peak suggest that, unlike Hartley's fascination with the masculine military, Cramer is celebrating the spiritual and physical Union of man and woman, an abstract joi de vive.

Matisse, The Dance (1), 1909

Picasso

Cramer's figurative work makes me long for that

of his famous contemporaries.

 

Marsden Hartley, Yliaster, 1932 , 25 x 28

In Yliaster (Paracelsus), Hartley recalled another legendary occultist, Philippus Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist whose cabalistic philosophy of evolution predated Darwin's theory by three centuries. According to Paracelsus, it is Yliaster, the protomateria, or base matter, that is the source of all elements: "When Evolution took place the Yliaster divided itself. . . melted and dissolved, developing from within itself the Ideos or Chaos . .. or Primordial Matter." With the action of the "individualizing power," from Yliaster "all production took place in consequence of separation, yielding the four basic elements. These are the phenomena that Hartley visualized. The uncharacteristically intense colors and distorted spaces in his representation of cosmic meltdown seem perfectly appropriate to the extraordinary event, Creation itself. The radiant sphere of Yliaster, already dividing into arcs, beams into the stylized cone of Popocatépeti, a sexual metaphor in landscape guise. The forms of earth, glowing as if molten, thrust upward into the excited air; 

 

  This painting shows the volcanic peak of Popocatepetl rising from a red plain against the disk of the sun. Fire and earth contend with the intense blues in the sky and lake, completing the four elements of earth, air, fire and water that Paracelsus described.-- Smithsonian Museum

What could be more ambitious than to  depict the creation of the universe?

But the piece appears underwhelming.

 

 

Hartley, Transference of Richard Rolle, 1932,  28 x 26

 

 

  Rolle's monogram hovers above a desolate landscape, emblazoned within a spiritual triangle against a similarly formed cloud, whose whiteness denotes a transcendent world.

 

This painting is more interesting with the poem that Hartley wrote to accompany it. Then we get a sense of Hartley’s spiritual journey.  But if a knowlege of spirituality is our purpose, we might ask why study Hartley when there are so many other more credible spiritual teachers

 in the foreground an ovoid pool of water repeats the caldera's form, its central jet responding to the downward dissolve of Yliaster and recalling Paracelsus's claim that "all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fount." Hartley, returning to occult concerns after years of relatively naturalistic landscape practice, must have been particularly moved by Paracelsus's conclusion that the earth, indeed all nature's elements, are "of an invisible, spiritual nature and have souls." Although adhering to no conventional denomination, Hartley was before nature a man of faith. He recalled his excitement upon first encountering Emerson's essays: "I felt as if I had read a page of the Bible. In Mexico, in the philosophy of Paracelsus and other mystics, he found another book of creation, and, while the paintings these writers immediately inspired may have been less cosmic than cabalistic, the impetus they provided for the merger of natural and metaphysical con-cerns, of objective and subjective, revitalized Hartley's creativity throughout his final decade.  

It is the subject matter, not the visual effect

that is spiritual in this painting.

The following are examples of the reverse, however:

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized #3, 1911-12, pastel on wood,  18 x 21

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized #2, pastel on paper in Masonite,  18 x 21

Arthur Dove,  Thunderstorm, charcoal on paper, 21 x 17, 1917 - 20

Arthur Dove, Thunder Shower, 20 x 32, 1940, oil and wax on canvas

Arthur Dove, Foghorns, 1929, oil on canvas, 18 x 26

Arthur Dove, untitled, 1940-43, wax and paint on paper, 3 x 4"

 

These miniatures really appeal to me

and they seem like they could have been made yesterday

as well as 80 years ago.

Arthur Dove, 3" x 4", 1940-46, mixed media

Arthur Dove, 3" x 4", 1940-46, mixed media

However, they do seem more like playful  experiments in design

than some kind of spiritual exercise or program.

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We move now onto Augustus Tack (1870-1949)

and we may note that he was seven to ten years older than Hartley and Dove.

That might explain why he’s more imbued with fin-du-siecle elegance.

Other painters, such as Augustus Vincent Tack, William Schwartz, and Will Henry Stevens, pursued similar strains in the development of their abstract vocabularies. Tack achieved note as a painter of portraits and religious subjects but also privately practiced abstraction, as evident in Storm, 1920-23 . Tack's was no mere summer thundershower any more than was Dove's. 

Augustus Tack;  The Storm, 1920-23,  36 x 48

 

 

 

 

Georgia O’Keefe, A Storm, pastel, 1922, 18 x 24"

 

Here's a sexier;  more exciting contemporary version of the same theme

 

 

Augustus Tack, As the Ships Go Sailing By, 1917, 31 x 24

Augustus Tack, Elizabeth Hudson, before 1915, 36 x 29

Augustus Tack, Order, 1916, 43 x 35

This abstract piece feels like a religious icon

Augustus Tack, Solitude, 1910-12, 18 x 6

I think he’s seen some Japanese prints.

Augustus Tack, Time and Timelessness, 1935, 39 x 85 

This was his commission for the curtain on the stage of a university theater.

"My mind naturally turned to the meaning of a university. How could the vital principle or soul of a university be expressed abstractly? A university - the center from which springs the expansion and development of human minds reaching out far into fields of astronomical proportions as well as into infinitesimally small ranges of microscopic discovery, and to find some symbol of creation in eternity - or of Time and Timelessness, and of the magnificent achievement of human intelligence, made in the image and likeness of God, was the purpose and the problem."

It appears pleasant enough

and appropriate for an institution that seeks Truth rather than proclaims it.

But if I were in the audience for a show,

I might fall asleep before the curtain was raised.

His great patron, however,  felt differently:

According to Duncan Phillips, Tack created an "awe-inspiring symmetry out of thundering chaos ... a symbol of a new world in the making, of turbulence stilled after the tempest by a universal God. " 

Phillips served simultaneously as the primary patron of both Tack and Dove, while also making a significant commitment to the work of O'Keeffe, which connotes much about the collector and his taste. It also suggests that, in their quest for expression of the ineffable, the artists whom Phillips favored, while individual in style, were united in spirit and intent and the pursuit of a mystical abstraction. Raised as a devout Catholic, Tack as an artist recalled his youthful beliefs in his representational. but still distinctive, scriptural subjects. Yet the spirit that infuses his decoratively patterned abstractions derives from no single or conventional faith.

William S. Schwartz, Symphonic Forms #16, 1932, 36 x 40"

I

William S. Schwartz,  Symphonic Firms from the Sea, 1963, 36 x 40"

William S. Schwartz,  Symphonic Forms on a Western Theme, 1930, 40 x 30

 The vogue for the translation of sound, particularly music, into painted images continued to capture many artists beyond the late 1910s. William Schwartz of Chicago, Russian-born painter and concert singer, was in many respects representative, although he differed from his colleagues in the acclaim he had enjoyed as an operatic tenor prior to receiving notice as a painter in the early 1920s. He achieved regional repute for his landscapes with figures, often poetically titled allegories à la Davies. As early as 1924 he began to produce a series of abstractions based upon musical motifs, collectively known as Symphonic Forms. As with Tack's compositions, however, these were privately done, and Schwartz withheld them from prairie salons for more than a decade. In later discussing the Symphonic Forms, Schwartz explained that he sought harmony of color, form, and line, just as he had in music. "In looking at nature, therefore, I search for materials which may be interpreted and manipulated until they become unified wholes and reveal the . . . harmony. . . representative of my own personality - my thoughts and my feelings. In the musical analogies and the search for an abstract expression of personality, the artist generally echoed Kandinsky's precepts. In looking to the external world for his materials, however, Schwartz closely followed the path of American spiritual abstraction.

 

A local gallery has several Schwartz Symphonic Forms (as well as his social realism) on display, and they have yet to move me.  They feel like the rooms of gemstones at the Field Museum.

Will Henry Stevens, Abstraction #2, 1938, pastel and paper on board 

 In New Orleans from the 1920s onward, Will Henry Stevens, like Schwartz, developed an abstract style that reflects the surviving vitality of the natural ethos. Stevens developed his youthful love of nature through readings of favorite American authors, especially Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Mark Twain, and in solitary rambles through his native Indiana countryside. Stevens always recalled Ryder's congratulatory words to him at his first solo exhibition in 1901 and his admonition, "Remember, you are a poet. Don't do what so many painters are doing today - painting out before nature all the time. Just walk out in the pleasant time of evening." Ryder's praise was shortly followed by another signal event in the young artist's career, his discovery of Sung dynasty paintings. Stevens responded intuitively and forcefully to the unfamiliar Chinese masters: "I could not look at Sung without realizing that it had the same kind of philosophy that I had discovered in Walt Whitman." Pursuing his new interest in oriental art and philosophy, Stevens was eventually led to P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum and the writings of Confucius and Lao-tzu, among others. His self-education, as well as his landscape painting, continued during his seasonal orbit between New York and the Midwest or, after 1921, Newcombe College in Louisiana, where he began his long art-teaching career. Stevens found particular inspiration in the words of Lao-tzu: "Man at his best, like water ... / Loves living close to the earth, / Living clear down in his heart."  "Rivers have meant very much to me," Stevens once acknowledged. "Inland rivers. I remember being charmed by Huckleberry Finn. If only one could get that spirit into painting!" In New Orleans he had the greatest subject of them all close at hand, the Mississippi, and  not far away the exceptional bayou country. In "these bayou people [who] have never tried to subdue nature but have harmonized their lives with natural order, " Stevens found vindication of oriental wisdom. 

 

 

Here’s a little gallery of Stevens’ work.  He sold his nature views and abstractions in separate galleries.

 

Even this piece titled "Lurking Menace" 

feels calm and  dreamy-

like peering through a microscope at a tiny world.

This one looks like the iPad sketches of David Hockney.

This work is so much gentler than the brash New York school that would rise in the following decades.

It’s been set  apart and above the passions and tragedies of daily life.

 

Prepared by his transcendentalist readings, surrounded by Louisiana's abundant and evocative verdure, and inspired by the oriental philosophers, Stevens began to move beyond the representation of his surroundings to new pictorial concerns. "The best thing a human can do in life, " he advised, "is to get rid of his separateness or selfness and hand himself over to the nature of things - to this mysterious thing called the Universal Order, that an artist must sense. To put yourself in the way of that Thing so that you become a vehicle of it - that will be your only merit - to put yourself in the way." As Stevens sought to get closer to nature, to the universal order, his imagery changed from description to abstraction. His discovery of Kandinsky and Klee in the 1930s lent impetus to this new direction in his art, finally leading to lyrical abstractions in an experimental variety of media . 

Among American artists, Stevens's case, like Schwartz's, is instructive. Their example suggests the difficulty of creating a novel abstract language and the diverse paths by which that objective was achieved. But even more important, it demonstrates that abstraction in the expression of nature's forces and materials was not the exclusive province of the Stieglitz circle but, by the 1930s, had become a more broadly based phenomenon, representing the native flavor of abstract art in America.

More specifically- the kind of nature those Americans invoked was the quiet peaceful kind.  Thunderstorms are as violent as it gets.  Your clothes dry off and you’re back to normal.

It was dog eat dog in the world of men - nature was a place for peaceful escape and refreshment - and so was art.

I'm not sad that times have somewhat changed.