Coming Abstractions

Modernism is so associated with abstraction that the term "abstract art" is sometimes used as a synonym.  The most celebrated modernist movements, cubism, futurism, and expressionism, all abstracted away from retinal realism.  Other movements, such as constructivism, suprematism, vorticism, bauhaus, and de stijl pushed this even further, experimenting with pure abstraction, devoid of representational significance.  Abstraction is now back in vogue, as evidenced by a recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, so it unsurprising that the Museum of Modern Art elected to mount a show tracing the its origins.  Inventing Abstraction is massive, spanning what may be the most inventive fifteen years in the history of Western Art.

Not every experiment in this period was successful, as the show dutifully reminds us, but the failures are often interesting, and it is nice to see them pulled out of the archives.  Even more welcome is the inclusion of artists who have failed to become household names, despite producing outstanding and important work.  Among them a number of women, reminding us that modernism ushered in new opportunities for women artists.  The image at the top of this blog is a painted metal sculpture by Katarzyna Korbo.  Korba was Riga reared, Russian trained, and final settled in Poland.  Though classified as a suprematist, this work also anticipates the minimalist sculptures of Judd and Lewitt.  The MoMA show also profiles Lyubov Popova, a more doctrinaire Russian suprematist.  The handsome piece to the left has been chosen for the front page of the museum's impressive web site.  They also hosted a huge Popova retrospective a couple decades back, which helped to establish her as the artist equal of Malevich, the more famous male pioneer of the movement.

The show also draws attention to another artist from Russia, Natalia Goncharova.  As the painting on the right illustrates, he style is more futurist than suprematist.  But, unlike the Italians, who innovated the idiom, Goncharova's work is more purely abstract.  One would be hard pressed to discern that this painting depicts cats.  Goncharava is also less concerned with capturing movement than the Italians.  Indeed, her aesthetic inspiration was the recently invented x-ray.  She called her style rayism.  The museum should be applauded from bringing this boutique movement into the limelight.  Taking inspiration from technology is a central part of the modernist ethos, and the evocation here of a medical technology brings to mind more recent explorations in art, which explore medical imagery (think of Damien Hirt's anatomical models, for example).


The exhibition reminds us that modernism was an international occurance.  Abstract art quickly came into vogue throughout Europe, West and East.  The museum traces the links between movements with a helpful diagram of interconnections (see the web version).  The advents of photographic reproduction, new modes of transport, and exhibition spaces increased the flow of ideas.  As the diagram makes clear, geographically proximate groups were in greater communication, leading to a constellation of coherent stylistic movements.  We find, for example, Gustav Klutsis creating architectural illustrations (left) that could easily be examples of El Lissitzky's method, which he called proun, also on display in the show.

In Western Europe, modernist abstraction took on somewhat different forms, such as futurism, mentioned above, cubism, and de stijl.  The latter is well represented in the show. There are a number of impressive Mondrians, like the one on the right. Mondrian had not yet moved to pure primaries.  He allows himself three shades of blue, resisting the more purist distillation that would soon some.  Still the work is radical.  The gulf between these grid paintings and the early Braque/Picasso cubist canvases is enormous.  This is the logical culmination of Cezanne's fractionation.  Painting has been turned into a period table of artistic elements.  The show confirms that Mondrian was not alone in his exploration of formal essentialism (encapsulating a recent de stijl retrospective at the Pompidou).  For example, there are works by fellow traveler Theo van Doesberg, including his stepwise abstraction of a cow.  Two panels are reproduced below, courtesy of the MoMA image archive.

Moving closer to home, the exhibit also shows us expressions of abstraction in the Anglophone world.  There are strong, if forgettable, paintings by Americans, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, for example, as well as abstract photos by Paul Strand.  England is represented by a collection of works from the Bloomsbury group, including pure abstractions by Vanessa Bell, and some choice examples of vorticism, which has gained attention lately.  Especially impressive is a huge angular canvas by David Bomberg (left).  This is one of the most contemporary looking works on display.



The show also reminds viewers that abstraction was a factor in movements that are more associated with other forms of invention.  For example, members of various dada movements have important cameos.  Several works by Marcel Duchamp are on view (including his Network of Stoppages, which, I will argue in a future blog, is among the most important paintings of the 20th century).  There is also an enormous and lovely example of Francis Picabia's early abstract work (right).  Picabia's abstractions are almost painfully aesthetic.  It is hard to believe that the same artist would be creating painting based on mechanical diagrams within a few years.  But it also makes sense.  The move from organic forms to machines in central to the project of early abstract art.


Exemplifying this intersection, the show includes an impressive painting by Duchamp's sister, Susanne (below left).  The spoke-like forms at the center evoke Marcel's bicycle wheel, but the title invites a different impression.  Called Funnel of Solitude, the image is a conceptual merger of machine (the funnel) and mind (solitude suggests a psychological state).  The painting is a kind of vortex that sucks viewers into to its black core.

The exhibit gives an even more prominent place to another woman in the orbit of dada, Sophie Taeuber-Arp.  Spouse and collaborator of Jean Arp, Sophie gets my vote as one of the most interesting artists of the early 20th century.  Her modes of expression were highly varied.  She made clothing and marionettes (not on display), as well as functional art (some bowls and containers are included in the exhibit).  Her two-dimensional works spanned a range of styles, that exemplify various modes of abstraction.  For example, she produced some exceptionally good examples of de stijl.  The show presents some of her more extreme abstract works, including a collaboration with Jean Arp, which is described as one of the first grid painting (below left).  It is also an experiment in mechanical production (the elements were cut on a cutting board) and chance (the method of arrangement was partially accidental).  It anticipates both conceptual art and minimalism.  The work on the right is equally interesting.  Here Taeuber-Arp continues to explore grids but changes her medium from paper to colored thread.  The picture is woven together, rather than pasted or painted, making it an early example of fiber art.  Taeuber-Arp was decades ahead of the curve in her efforts to elevate craft media into fine art.

Lets turn finally to the titular question of the show.  Who actually invented abstraction?  Who was the first to break away from representation completely?  Here answers will vary.  The textbook answer is Kandinsky, who is unsurprisingly given a prominent place at the start of the exhibition.  Other pioneers are also presented, however, including a lovely group of paintings by the Bohemian artist, Frantisek Kupka.  In one, a portrait of his spouse, we see a face nestled in a sea of colorful vertical brushstrokes.  In the others, the representational element is removed, and we find only the brushstrokes, making these some of the earliest examples or pure abstraction (circa 1910).

The search for an inventor may be moot, however, since abstraction was clearly in the air.  The rapidity of its spread and the extraordinary variety of forms in which it found expression testifies to an artworld eager to break from the confines of mimetic imitation.  The story of how abstraction came into being is almost too familiar to recount.  Its arrival seems inevitable in hindsight, after the transition from Cezanne to cubism.  Of course, abstraction did not need to be invented.  It was always already there.  In  body-paint and adornments, in textiles and architecture, in Islamic decorative motifs and Paleolithic rock carvings, and even in the palette and formal structure of representational paintings.  Abstraction was not so much invented in 1910 as exposed.  The frenzy with which it overtook the artworld was partially a function of the cult of the new, which is central to modernism, but it can be equally understood as fueled by an insight so basic that it could not be ignored.  Once noticed, it becomes glaringly obvious that all art is, at some level, abstract.

Lab Roth

Dieter Roth was born in Hamburg in 1930, and, in 1943 his family fled to his mother's native Switzerland.  He ended up living in a house in Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, along with other refugees, including Jewish and Communist artists.  He began making art in that house and didn't stop until his death in 1998.  In that half century, Roth produced an extraordinary range of work, which is now being honored at two exhibitions in New York--one at MoMA and the other at the impressive Hauser and Wirth gallery in Soho.  Roth was first and foremost an experimentalist.  What is most impressive about his output is the variety of media, techniques, and concepts that he explored.  One charming and timely example (courtesy of MoMA) is the bunny made from rabbit droppings, above. Part artist, part mad scientist, his work is a celebration of the artistic process even more than the product, though some of the products are remarkable to behold.

The MoMA show spans Roth's career, and includes some of his early experiments in graphic arts.  These include prints, books, postcards.  One impressive series includes images of tourist destinations that have been modified or partially occluded with blocks of color.  He also began using newspapers as a medium at this time.  The above left example show Roth experimenting with Pop iconography including comic images and printers dots, around the same time as Lichtenstein and Polke.  The image on the right (from the MoMA site) shows a tiny book made from newspaper.  Roth made books obsessively, and was obsessed with printed word.  The images below (left image from MoMA) show examples of his Literaturwurst--sausages made from classic books.

These sausage forms also relate to two other kinds of media experiments that can be found in Roth's work.  He liked to use food products to create art, as in frames spices below (courtesy of MoMA), and he also made a number of biodegradble works, in which foodstuffs were allowed to decay, as in the jarred doll, covered in mould on the right.  These experiments began in 1964.  The draw attention to the impermanence of art.  Everything is in a state of decay.  The world's masterpieces are changing each year, and will eventually return to dust.  This notion of impermanence resonates with themes in Zen Buddhism.  The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi is intended to celebrate the transience and imperfection of all things.   Roth's rotting works also have a post-modern appeal; they reminds us that artists are not in total control of what they produce.  Biodegrable art is collaborative art--the minuscule mindless organisms living all around us take part in selecting their colors and forms.

Food and decay are also important themes in the Hauser and Wirth exhibition.  That show includes some of Roth's celebrated experiments with chocolate and candy as art media.  Done in collaboration with Dieter's son Björn Roth, also an artist, the exhibition was involved a performative element of gradual creation, as well as decay.  A group of assistants cast numerous heads using various confections, and built two tall towers with them, over a period of weeks.  One is a colorful collection of canine-looking (apparently lions, however) and self-portraits of Roth (like the yellow one below).   The other is made of chocolate Roth heads, which develop a white film over time.

The gallery show also included prints, paintings, video, and a grand installation.  One of the collaborative paintings, which a wonderful and extremely knowledgeable security guard identified as his favorite, is reproduced on the left.  It shows a figure in a chair looking out at a seascape with swirls of color--perhaps an artist's mind intermingling with the world.  The installation recreates an artist's studio.  A number of these have appeared elsewhere (e.g., P.S.1 and the Hamburger Bahnhof).  Though visually assaulting, they reinforce the mad scientist theme, by presenting world of alchemical chaos, in which food products (such as beer bottles) and traditional art media are interspersed.  Two small details are presented below along with a video still showing the elder Roth at work in his laboratory.

By sheer salience and scale, the centerpiece at Hauser and Wirth is a giant floor (two floors, actually) that were laboriously shipped at incredible expense from the artist's former studio in Iceland.  Roth moved to Iceland after the war, married an Icelandic woman, became a citizen, and raised three children there, including Björn.  This outpost allowed him to conduct his endless experiments at one remove from the epicenters or European and American art.  Though hardly an outsider, it is likely that geographical distance helped Roth avoid getting completely absorbed into one of the successive movements that emerged after the war.  He was affiliated with Fluxus, and one can find many hints of pop, new realism, conceptualism, and arte povera in his work.  He often walked in lock step with current trends.  But he never became wedded to a single approach, and that restless spirit makes his work seem more contemporary and more urgent than the pantheonic figures which whom these movements are associated.  Roth's studio floor (made with red tiles that were apparently pervasive in Europe) can be seen as a giant readymade.  It looks like an abstract painting, but its many marks are created by accident, not intention.  Like Roth's biodegradable art, it can also be compared to a gargantuan peri dish in which the artist himself has left tell-tale traces.  Fortunately this is not the only trace he left behind.  These two exhibitions remind us that Roth was among the most productive and inventive artists of the later 20th century, and his contributions should be elevated from the footnotes into the main texts of art history.

Drawn to Surrealism

Surrealism is sometimes seen as something of an embarrassment.  Silly in a century of seriousness, illustrational during in a era that rejected representation, Freudian in ways that now seem fraught.  An exhibition currently at the Morgan Library (earlier at LACMA) seeks to correct that image.  The exhibit focusses on surrealist drawings, broadly construed to include mixed media and collage, which is a good choice, since the surrealists did much to turn drawing into a respected medium.  It draws attention to the international impact of the movement, its inclusiveness, its experimentation, and its influence on subsequent art forms.  Some of the works, like the impressive André Masson above, anticipate things happening in art right now (think of Julie Mehretu).

The exhibit includes many things that one would expect to see in a surrealist show, such as frottages by Ernst (which, admittedly, I detest), and a collection of exquisite corpses (which, admittedly, I love).  A bit more surprising is a wonderful formalist montage by Matta (below), which is more geometric than his usual work, and the monochrome format save us from his ghastly palette. 

The show also makes special effort to establish that surrealism was not just a French thing, nor even French, Belgian, and Spanish.  There are collages by Joseph Cornell, a nice postcard piece by Roland Penrose, some fine works by Mexican surrealists, including César Moro, Czech artists such as, Jindřich Štyrský, and Ei-Kyu (!), from Japan.  See examples below.

Seeing these works reminds one of surrealism's enduring influence in these countries.  Within Mexican art, there are close ties between surrealism and mural painting, in the Czech republic there is an ongoing tradition of surrealist animation, and, in Japan, phantasmagoric imagery is a mainstay of the anime-aesthetic.  Rather than seeing these international expressions as offshoots of French art, the show suggests that there was a large cross- national conversation.  That said, many of the highlights in the show are French.  I was particularly taken with the erotically charged works of Georges Hugnet.  Interestingly, these some how evoke the eroticism of Japanese cinema, and one wonders about the lines of influence. 

In addition to it's international emphasis, the other main editorial element of the show is the effort to demonstrate a link between surrealism and subsequent movements.  We see, for example, a mediocre Rothko, which serves a missing link between surrealist drawings and his more iconic abstractions, as well as a somewhat more successful Pollack (below).

 There are also some Paolozzi's, the unsung originator of pop art, which hint at the idea that pop grew out of surrealism.  This is probably a distortion, because pop iconography owes more to dada, but the juxtapositions here are suggestive (below, left).  

Another link is suggested between surrealist automatic drawings and subsequent experimentations with chance.  Near the end of the show, there is an appealing Ellsworth Kelly consisting of a grid of lines that have been assembled using a random method.  Dadaists like Arp, Tzara, and Duchamp may be a greater influence on this work, devoid as it is of the dream-like imagery that weighs down the surrealist enterprise.  But still, the exhibition succeeds in rescuing surrealism from the periphery and repositioning it as one of the most influential and long-lasting movements in recent art.