PICTURES OF NOTHING
ABSTRACT ART SINCE POLLOCK
The first in a series of five lectures delivered by Kirk Varnedoe in 2003 as part of the Mellon Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art
The video is here
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My title today is: why abstraction? and the title of the overall Melon lecture series is called pictures of nothing : abstract art since Jackson Pollock, and I should say at the beginning that overall title for this year‘s lectures is taken from the English author Hazlitt writing about the early 19th century English painter JMW Turner. Now as you can see from these two Turner landscape paintings of the 1840s a red sky over a beach on the left a snowstorm in the harbor‘s mouth on the right Turner was celebrated or notorious for painting, vaporous, and indistinct conjurings of atmospheric effects, and Hazlitt reports this remark of one dyspeptic viewer about such works as pictures of nothing , and very like. the attitude skeptical at best and dismissive, seems as premonitory of modern reactions to abstract art as Turner is himself.. But since such skepticism is what I’m out to confront and since the issues of both nothingness and likeness have a big place in what I’m after, the steal from Hazlitt seem to be the right tease and provocation, but though the issues may be similar, the time I’m addressing is very different.
Why would a discussion of abstract art be driven by what it doesn’t have? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on what has been present? Even if that does raise the question: “present for whom? Experts in the visual arts are not supposed to share personal experience.
Eventually, however, an explanation is forthcoming: Varnedoe considers his lectures at the National Gallery to be a response to Ernst Gombrich’s defense of illusionism delivered there fifty years earlier.
BTW, before he wrote art and literary criticism, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) painted portraits, and once even had a piece accepted by the Royal Academy. The dyspeptic viewer was probably himself. He had mastered that solid sense of volume he had seen in old master paintings at the Louvre. But as a professional essayist in progressive publications, he probably did not want to be known as reactionary.
I’m going to talk about abstract art over the last 50 years or so. The big question here is “Why abstract art?” And why 50 years? 50 years because backing up that far takes us to the mid 1950s and a crucial juncture in 20th century culture. To say why it was crucial takes backing up even further. Modern art in general and abstract art in particular, had been dominated by Europe and I show you your Picasso’s Ma Joli of 1911 and a Picasso wooden construction of 1914.
Picasso, Ma Jolie
I’ve long felt that analytic cubism made pictures of nothing - lacking not just recognizable subject, but also any emotion. I walk right past it when visiting art museums - there’s so much other stuff nearby to thrill and cheer. But when put it on a wall by itself, yes, there is a gritty reality of enduring interest there, like a liquor bar in the early morning, before it’s been cleaned.
The fragmentation and the reassembling of the world affected by Picasso and George Braque, and their Parisian cubism of 1909, allowed, encouraged and goaded several artists, especially from outline countries like Holland and Russia to push further into a world of forms without any remaining trace or reference to recognizable objects or scenes.
I show you Kazimir Malevich “White on White” painting in the museum of modern art of 1918 and a typical Mondrian painting composition of the 1920s. The invention of these new kinds of abstract or non-objective art coincided with the cataclysm of World War I and they explained their renovations in manifesto terms of revolutions in both society and consciousness, proposing that they laid bare more fundamental more absolute more universal truths appropriate to a new spirituality and to modern science and the emergence of a new human order.
but with the rise of totalitarian governments and eventual collapse of Europe into a second world war the original utopian aspirations of the pioneer abstractionist seem thwarted and their collectivist optimism, discredited. Then during and immediately after the configuration of European culture in World War II, a new push towards abstract art then appeared amongst younger artists in America, especially in New York, but this the motivations and ambition seemed sharply different.
And I show you the gorgeous painting in the national Gallery collection lavender mist on the left and the very large 18 foot long Barnett Newman painting in the museum of modern art called fear hero Suma.
both paintings of 1950 but came to be called abstract expressionism in the art of Jackson Pollock Barnett Newman will intoning Mark Rothko, and others emerged now from a surrealist context in the unconscious mind and was to paraphrase one of these artists “made out of ourselves without any accompanying insistence on the former metaphysical or social agendas of abstraction the mid 1950s was a key moment for the emergence of this new kind of American abstract painting when it was explored internationally and had important exhibitions
Detail
Johns’ scrupulously hand-painted flag object, seems in effect to transmute DuChamps old way of not making art into a new way of making art. Instead of remaining a kind of hermetic in joke of art about art Johns’ flag opened the way for many artists on to life, and along with the work of his partner, Robert Rosenberg , it catalyzed the explosion of Realism in pop art, for example, embracing photography advertising in the whole image saturated world of modern media that Greenberg‘s ideal of a pure abstraction had so strenuously excluded.
Our starting point in the mid 50s then seems simultaneously to present a new form of abstraction and a new kind of challenge to or resistance against its premises and that’s the argument. I’m interested in documenting as it unfolds. For a lot of people who think and write a lot about culture, though, this moment is an even even bigger water shed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world. A great divide between the world to a Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not however one of those people and this dichotomy is not what I’m here to talk about. Those who believe in a strict, modern postmodern opposition will probably be discomforted and an important part of the story I have to tell this spring is about how strains from these two seeming opposite camps from John’s and Pollock, for example, from Picasso and DuChamps, overlapped and blended and about how important new language is depend precisely on those unexpected hybrids.
If Modernism demanded powerful form regardless of probable meaning - that might help explain the proliferation of the many exciting kinds of painting, including abstract, that erupted in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Could that demand be met by pieces that require correct interpretation to be called art ? “Flag” does not convince me - but Varnedoe may well have a different notion of modernism.
And why are we talking about hybrids anyway? I thought these lectures were about “Pictures of Nothing”
Stella’s ‘Marriage of reason and Squalor “, from a modern arts collection of 1959, for example, seems in some sense as a radical reaction against Pollock and yet Stella described it as what he called reverse Pollockism and there are many things about it be all over composition, wall to wall, edge to edge, the even distribution of emphasis across the canvas, the black industrial house paint which mimic what Pollock did, that are a direct response to Pollock’s work, whereas the stripes in the picture of Stella as he himself has said, seemed to come directly from John’s; just as the handmaid John’s flag is unthinkable, but without either Cezanne or Duchamps as a combined set of influencers and traditions so the Stella doesn’t seem to make sense unless you put together rather than set apart the modern Pollock and the postmodern Johns.
Does it have value based only on how it looks, apart from that context of Pollock/Johns?
Conundrums like this interests me a great deal but more basically I don’t buy the modern postmodern split because I don’t put a lot of stock in either ism, or indeed isms in general. Epoques don’t have essences. History doesn’t work by all governing unities, and works of art in particular tend to be quickly hard to pin down to generalities. These Mellon lectures will dwell on experience and works of art between the vague confusions of individual experience and the authority of big ideas. Sign me up for experience first. Given one minute more to either parse critical theory or stammer towards the qualities of the individual work of art, I will use the time for the latter. This may sound like dumb anti-intellectualism but I hope it’s something better.
Abstraction, of course, has a lot to do with ideas, and a lot of talk and theory. One of the valuable things it does, and does more fiercely than a lot of other arts, is to make us think and to read what others think. Greenberg on Pollock Professor Michael Fried last year‘s Mellon lecture on Stella and so on,
For some, the compulsion to think about an artwork is directly proportional to the credibility of the presenting institution - and - inversely proportional to how good it looks.
…..but it is experientially also crucially about particulars. The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully.
This makes sense until you consider the reverse: “the more there is to look at, the less important it is that we look closely and carefully.” I doubt anyone would agree with that.
The reason to look carefully, for example, at the simple shape of a teacup is not that there is less to look at - but that somehow its immediate aesthetic intensity compels you. (if it actually does)
..that’s also critical to what abstract art is all about: small differences, make all the difference So, for example, the next time somebody tries to sell you on the mechanical exactitude of Stella stripes, think again about the beautiful delicate breathing space in these stripes, the incredible feathered edge of the touch of the picture which has everything to do with its kind of dark espresso ground, best generation blackness that gives the picture it’s particular relationship to its epic time. This doesn’t translate well in photographs and it’s easy to lose in theory, but it’s critical to the experience of the picture.
Yes, this piece can summon a certain mood associated with the Beat Generation, but why is that mood more important than, say, the moods created by thirty second television commercials? And couldn’t many variations, including even a surface covered with thick black paint, summon the same or very similar feeling?
Hard examination and questioning of the specificity of works of abstract art, and the experience of the viewer are our best way to hold out against them and test big ideas, What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the kind of ideas that flow out of and drive us back towards such confusing particulars of experience rather than the kind of idea that constantly and confidently mushes such things into soupy generalities. Still even though these talks will always try to focus down on individual works and creators. I’m also constantly going to be trying to indicate the connection of these artists with broader histories as wel: Cold War in Vietnam, America versus Europe, capitalism and socialism and so on.
Varnedoe does not enter this painting to live in it - it’s more like he’s taken a fishing expedition to find ideas connectable to outside narratives.
and given the extent of such ground cover, even though I make no pretense to inclusiveness and work only and highly selective and partial slices I am going necessarily to paint time again with comically broad brushes, and thus those who prefer reductive generalization and crude caricature summary summary will still, I am afraid, probably find a lot to like about what I’m going to do.
At least we’ve been forewarned! Big generalizations are fun, even if only as targets.
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Varnedoe is a sharp and engaging speaker, and I love how he’s always showing examples.
But it’s becoming ever more clear that, despite his full throated advocacy for the “specificity of works and experience of the viewer”, his focus is just on ideas. His aesthetic responses to abstract art are limited to offhand comments like "beautiful" or "gorgeous"
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I’m gonna start out next week talking about the 1950s , one of the standard stories of the 1950s and art history of recent years tells how the museum of modern art and the CIA colluded to promote abstract expressionism as an American tool in the Cold War battle, but this little paranoid cliché is not only flawed in itself, but hides some more interesting complex confusions and overlaps in the 1950s between ongoing pre-war traditions, especially what’s called constructivism with the agendas of science and the rule of objective order, aesthetic and social, and some new departures that had similar forms with very dissimilar premises.
One of the key instances in this regard is Ellsworth Kelly’s work in Paris in the early 1950s like this beautiful work that he donated the museum modern art called “ Colors for a large wall”, which is apparently close to, but crucially different from the math based systematic or systemic art of an artist like Richard Paul Lohse and the Zürich group with which he was associated, in exactly the same years, and this is a Lohse painting realized later, but based on a drawing and a system conceived exactly at the same time as Kelly. Sorting out the difference between what Kelly was after, and what Lohse was after we preliminarily are looking at the idea that this kind of art, which looks so backward when Pollock was painting in 1950, which seems so retrograde in terms of the triumph of broad gestural abstract expressionism, then in the 1960s , suddenly became confused with or exhibited with, as if it were the same thing, minimalist avant- garde work by younger artists like Carl Andre.
To follow conceptual art is to be concerned with artists’ intentions. (Otherwise DuChamps “Fountain” goes back to the men’s restroom). All of the intentions attributed to Kelly by MOMA would seem to produce dreadful results and yet …. well… I kinda like how it turned out anyway.
Here’s an Andre floor piece of the 1970s with exactly, seemingly, the same modular construction, same rigor as Kelly. The story of Kelly’s genesis in the world of Paris, perhaps the last American painter to have been crucially formed in Paris at a time when abstract expressionism was making the New York school. The story of Kelly’s formation and then co-optation in the 60s by minimalism will provide a different view of the 50s.
A pleasant aesthetic combined with “rigor” seems to be the recipe for this kind of work. Intention is all that separates it from a mass produced checkerboard. It can make for a nice photo, however.
Nothing more than an optical, illusion made with two slide projectors that face the corner of adjoining walls of a dark room. But nothing says that a high school science project can’t be displayed and sold and as art.
I wanna turn to the 60s itself and to minimalism in double forms at least if not several forms like Robert Morris‘s gray box of 1966 on the right and Jim Terrell Los Angeles artist a light projection on the left called Proto Aphram of exactly the same same year. Minimalism, of course, is the new kind of hard edge abstraction that emerged around and after 1960 in sharp reaction against the loose gestural, abstract, painting that it followed from abstract expressionism. Minimalism was so drastically reductive that it appeared utterly nihilistic, but within the dead certainty and flat lines that it seemed to propose lurk a lot of ambiguities and contradictions and I want to examine the battles within and overlaps between very different readings of this new push in abstract art. I want to confront for example it’s claims to be purely American and it’s philosophical base and it’s “I’ve gotta kick this to believe it” sort of empiricism, and how this represented a willed and self proclaimed split with Europe at the same time that the art seems to coincide with and drawn important revivals of the sculpture of Brancusi,for example, the Romanian or Russian Constructivism.
The play of ideas is very different from the play of paint on a panel. All those ambiguities and contractions don't make anything better to look at.
Varieties that appear in New York in Los Angeles, so that the gray neutral painted gray box of Robert Morris is so different and it’s reductive feeling again of the utter object hood of the sculpture versus Terrell‘s conjuring of a box that doesn’t exist at all, but is purely a light illusion that has entirely to do with playing on the sensorium, with creating inner events rather than external event events with an art that only exist inside in opposition to New York’s desire to create something that only exists outside and then to look at the varieties of things in between so that between the gray neutrality of Morris, for example and the shining illumination of Terrell one might position something like Donald Judd’s aluminum open box in 1969 and Judd will be someone we want to talk a lot about.for his combination of a seemingly rigorous reductive, geometry and odd materials, Harley Davidson, paint, galvanized metal, colored, plexi glass, etc. that deal with a different kind of delicacy in a different kind of subtlety than one finds in the manifestos of his work.
Enough already.
It now appears that even if Varnedoe were to talk about art that interested me, he will only address how it plays a conceptual game. He was the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA from 1984-1997, so that approach must have been endemic to that institution at that time. Echoing Frances Colpitt, later in these lectures, he will declare: "Minimalism revives and renovates what it seems to kill...it is a radically new kind of art, not a sophisticated variation on traditional modernism."
Death does eventually revive and renovate the universe. That’s what got us from microbes to intelligent primates. But I no more wish to view minimalism than I do a rotting corpse. And the iconic examples are not Art any more than a dead dog is a dog.
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So I will stop reading him now - except that - curiously enough, he's not done talking about “Pictures of Nothing" as he opens a discussion of “Art and Illusion”, the lectures that Ernst Gombrich delivered from this same distinguished podium in 1956, almost the same year Pollock died and Jasper Johns painted “Flag”. At this point in his lecture, it’s clear that “nothing” does not mean just the absence of recognizable objects, it also means the absence of feeling as well - i.e. Minimalism.
But in this moment of enshrinement, of monumentalization that we're in, abstraction, having been the great topic of the past century, also now feels in suspension, in eclipse.and we wonder whether abstraction holds the same attraction for the younger generation, what are they doing in this vein? And has abstraction, perhaps become banalized, defanged. The litmus test argument, has it now lost its problematic?
Ideas do lose their luster with familiarity - but curiously - beautiful objects do not - at least for those who have a psychological need to experience them.
So perhaps there is a basic doubt in everything I’ve laid out,… in addition to all these how stories over the past several decades, I feel obliged to ask some why questions .. including the big one, why abstraction"…. What is abstract art good for? For us as individuals, or for any society, Of pictures of nothing… I want to ask if there’s any grounding, of any logic , of any logic of the situation.
In 1956. Gomberg gave the Mellon lectures that became the book called "Art and Illusion" Let me take a bit of a detour for a minute or two to recapture some of the excitement that must’ve filled the National Gallery lecture hall in 1956 as he asked one of the biggest of all questions. Why does art have a history? ...the riddle of style : what explains the succession of odd stylizations by which different epochs and civilizations have represented the visible world? Since the world has always looked as it does, he asked, and since human eyes always function with the same wiring, why do ancient Egyptians and medieval Italian monks and Baroque ceiling painters show the world so differently. He was intensely dissatisfied with the kind of explanations that just fell back on some mystical spirit of the age, of Zeitgeist. instead, he wanted an explanation of the history of art that had more scientific and philosophical rigor.that would take into account both the permanent way we think, the way individual perception is hardwired to work and the way knowledge can progress accumulatively through successive ages in societies. His proposal, which drew on the best minds of his time in areas like perceptual psychology, and philosophy of science, was that within the confounding variety of the history of Western art could be seen a long, piece meal, but ultimately rational, progress towards the development of credible illusionism that is the trick of getting a viewer to conjure from painted marks on a flat surface, a convincing illusion of such things as seamlessly receiving space and three-dimensional volumes and this is a Piero Della Francesca of the mid 14th Century.
Call it what you like, but there is much more to the viewing experience than ocular anatomy and the physical properties of reflecting surfaces. And why assume that these historical artists were all trying to paint what they saw - so their “mistakes” are the result of ignorance? Gombrich is well aware of this and he puts the above cartoon at the beginning of his book, as if he were in on the joke. Ancient Egyptian artists presented much that was anatomical (and elegant!) about the human body. But it’s still a joke to suggest that their typical twisted depictions of walking figures was a consequence of not taking a post-Renaissance life drawing class.
It's hard to believe that a stellar art historian could possibly be insensitive to what these historical images were expressing. Was he just trying to relate to the scientific minds at the university? Just across campus from the physical sciences, the academic humanities still dream of discovering the algorithms that govern human behavior - despite no progress over the past century.
Not sure what counts as “credible illusionism” to Gombrich, but I’m pretty sure that many post Renaissance paintings would not qualify, and even more post-Impressionist. It’s a quality that fascinates him more than most viewers and artists.
Gombrich wanted to show that far from being a nearly servile copying of nature, we see it we draw it, Illusionist representation had been a real hard fought achievement of human culture.
Gombrich packed his book with images of many great masterpieces by Rembrandt, Constable, Van Eyck etc. But ever since Zeuxis painted grapes that could fool birds (Aristotle Poetics) , there have been many more illusionist painters than great artists. Nor really sure Gombrich could tell the difference without relying on the canon.
Gombrich thought abstraction was understandable as an extension of the history of decorative pattern making, like the above Alhambra designs as well as rugs, basket weaves, tile work and the like, but if I can risk summing up and interpreting his many writings on the subject of abstract art, he seems to have felt that all arguments that modern abstract art might be something more than this were based either on mystifications about modern abstraction, reflecting hidden metaphysical truths, or in specious arguments that the tides of history in the modern age somehow required such innovations.
Nothing from the Alhambra appears in my edition of “Art and Illusion”, so I have selected my own (And surprisingly, there’s not that many online).
Don’t know of any connections between modernist abstract painters, and the various traditions of ornamentation, but I do agree with Gombrich that the moderns do not surpass the very best examples from the past, even when they are quite different.
Also don’t know where Gombrich stood on this, but the best of any art cannot be accounted for solely by what proceeded it It has a spirit all its own.
It was precisely that lethal combination of belief and higher ideals, stretching back to Plato and pronouncements about the requirements of history grounded in Hagel, and Gombrich’s close friend the philosopher Popper had just recently scourged in his wartime book, “The Open Society and its Enemies”, as the false philosophical foundations of totalitarian thinking as propounded both by fascism and by Soviet communism. I put it far more crudely than professor Gomberg ever would have: the implicit message of Art and Illusion seems to be that the construction of illusionist naturalism is directly consonant with a neurological hardwiring of human nature, and that the progressive way it developed makes illusionism also the appropriate house style of the best liberal traditions of free and criticism in open western Society.
Norris Kelly Smith had much the same idea in “Here I Stand”: where there is a credible illusionism with one point perspective (the point where the viewer stands), it places that viewer into a virtual reality in which he participates as a citizen.
This may account for Renaissance Italy, but we may note. that both Fascist and Soviet Art abhored abstraction in favor of a convincing illusionism. Their citizens were required to be passive on pain of death.
I want to wonder with you now whether they could ever be an argument for abstract art that was as good, as generous, as ambitious, as challenging as art for its opposite. Lord knows we need something better than what we’ve got because as Sir Ernst rightly saw, all the many claims about timeless, universal forms, and historical destinies that have been used to explain modern abstraction, or however, sincerely sophisticated —- were, in the end, intellectually bankrupt. There aren’t any hard reasons why abstraction has to be - any teleology that explains why it developed as it did - and it’s useless to keep looking for those kinds of justification and the familiar soft, explanations that it’s just a big hoax, a colossal version of the emperor‘s new clothes, perpetrated on a duped public by cynical art mandarins repeated decade after decade, is just whistling in the dark, since abstract art has been with us , in one form for another for almost a century now, and has proved not only a long-standing crux of cultural debate, but a self renewing vital tradition of creativity.
Could the same be said for Impressionism? It has lasted even longer, and unlike abstraction, actually is a coherent tradition of techniques and aesthetics. Some abstract painting is like that - including those who continue various strains of the New York school. But many others equate creativity with a market driven need for novelty in concept, materials, technique. And those are the ones which Varnedoe has been showing us ----like this one, for example:
And I could take the case of Donald Judd‘s early minimal sculptures A lighthearted, somewhat comic example here is a very early judge from 62. Judd was making what he called in one of his famous essay specific objects, that is he wanted things which didn’t seem to be either painting or sculpture which escaped category which weren’t familiar which couldn’t be pinned down to what they were. They were entirely idiosyncratic outside the common balance of descriptive language not anything anybody was prepared for, but in fact in dealing with these things, he himself and his viewers and critics started immediately categorizing these objects and continue to and in the literature were up to today. This weird work is known as Judd’s letterbox of 1962 and/or Kleenex box,
What we still need, what is way overdue, is to make the case for a logic of abstract art as “Art and Illusion” made the case for illusionism.— that would describe it too, with respectful opposition to Gombrich’s s own dismissals, both as a legitimate reflection of the way we think individually and also as a valid and valuable aspect of liberal society, and this would of course be a tall order not at least because we have some very different ideas of the start of the 21st-century about how our minds work and how a just society functions. we have to, for example looking at work like Flavin’s, revise and expand Gombrich’s idea of making, that is the invention of autonomous forms and schemas as the mind’s primal work of building knowledge.
Varnehoe is presenting an alternative reality, in which Gombrich makes sense, abstract art is specific to a free society as well as uniquely appropriate to “the way we think”. But it’s not just his idea. It’s shared by many in that lecture hall and the broader world of the academic humanities. He is preaching to the choir.
If you’re not in that congregation, however, It’s a lot to swallow, especially how :
over the last 50 years, a lot of abstract art has demonstrated the way our intelligence innovates in many spheres, not by whole cloth invention or by discovering new things about nature, but by operating with a pun, the repertoire of the already known by adapting, recycling, isolating, recontextualizing, repositioning, and combining inherited available, conventions, or in the case of art existing dumb, man-made forms like those of architecture and objects cubes and stripes to propose new entities as the bearers of new thought.
If we are concerned with how human minds work, very few have given much thought to art and most could care less about the innovations discussed above.
Abstraction and illusionism are rather difficult to firmly distinguish except as intentions. Varnehoe considers art to be “vessels of human intention” - but don’t most paintings appear to have been been made with many, various, possibly contradictory, and possibly fleeting intentions?
If we are concerned with how specific art actually appears upon close examination, as Varnedoe says we should be, intentions are less important than results. Then it would make more sense to say that visual art is just light reflecting surfaces - some more illusionistic or referential than others. And all kinds have been with us for as long as humans have been making things.
Then Varnedoe then makes that same point himself - quoting what Gombrich calls “the viewer’s share”.
Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986
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