Text h. Abstract Art as an International Language

Not least under the influence of the European emigrant artists, the American art scene, which had hitherto attracted little international attention, and which was marked by new forms of realism not unlike ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ came to set the tone in the international concert of the visual arts after World War II. The piece being played was called abstraction. The tune was well-known. In the first twenty years of the century a few sparrows had whistled it from the rooftops: the Expressionists Kandinsky and Klee, the Bauhaus Constructivists, the painters of the Russian avant-garde and the Surrealists had prepared the ground with their art. The veterans of Classical Modernism, or those who were still living, formed the link between the pre-war and post-war eras.

All forms of figurative painting were rejected in the West after the war, less on aesthetic than on ideological grounds. In an over-hasty defensive reaction, all forms of figurative representation were equated with Nazi art or the state-commissioned Socialist Realism propagated as a politically correct artistic expression in the Eastern Block.

Abstract painting, on the other hand, because of its openness and its free-floating content, was seen as the only art that could be appropriate to the ‘free West’. It was in this way that abstract painting became the clearly dominant style in the western hemisphere in the 50s.

Abstract Art uses forms having no direct reference to external or perceived reality; it is usually synonymous with various types of 20th-century avant-garde art. The term abstract also refers to images that have been abstracted or derived from nature, but which in the process have been considerably altered or have been simplified to their basic geometric or biomorphic forms. The term nonobjective, once used to describe certain kinds of abstract art, has been abandoned by most contemporary art critics and historians.

It may come as a surprise that abstract art, which was in itself so inaccessible, should have sought to have an influence on everyday life. After the shocking experiences of the First World War some artists did not return to a realistically imitative painting, but took the tendencies towards abstraction, already laid down in Expressionism, to an entirely non-figurative painting which bore no comparison to the visible world, which the artists now wanted not to emulate but to change. Only an art based solely on artistic and aesthetic necessities could lead mankind to harmony and smooth the way to a better society. “Only the pure appearance of the elements, in a balanced relationship, can lessen the tragedy of life… and then we will need no more statues and paintings, for we will live in an art that has become reality,” Piet Mondrian wrote. The world of art was compared with reality; abstraction came to bear the utopia of a better world. In order to realize the dream of leading mankind to harmony and unity through art, two conditions had to be fulfilled: on the one hand, art itself must be harmonic, clear and pure. On the other, this new art had to have access to everyday life in order to have a social effect. For this reason the activities of the artists were not restricted to painting. The idea of abstraction also found its way into architecture and product design, or more precisely it was stimulated by their principle of functionalism. Both everyday objects and paintings were to be constructed solely on the basis of their own inherent laws. Thus in the visual arts the style was called ‘Constructivism’.

The actual birthplace of Constructivism was Russia: out of ‘Cubo-Futurism’, a mixture of Cubist and Futurist tendencies, Kasimir Malevich had developed a painterly concept which radically denied all representation. In 1914-15 he painted his first Black Square on White Ground, of which many versions followed. About this icon of abstraction he explained, “Everything expressive and anecdotal that persisted in abstraction, for all its lack of figuration, should be eradicated”. The Black Square for him was an expression of pure emotion, because in it all ideas of the objective world were eliminated. Malevich called his art ‘Suprematism’, as emotion was placed above the object. In this completely nonobjective approach he used only geometric elements – rectangles and squares, first with some color and then with white on white. A noteworthy example is his Suprematist Composition: White on White (one of a series, 1918, Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

Malevich’s artistic radicalism was to pave the way for the De Stijl artists (Holland), who wanted to eliminate all individual caprice from their creativity, and the Bauhaus group (Germany). The painters of these groups created geometrical, technical compositions made out, for example, of calculated rectangles, straight black lines meeting in the right-hand corner, and smooth colour patches without any painterly gestures. For them, these sober forms signified the greatest harmony, balance and peace.

The artists after the Second World War did not want to use abstract art to outline new values or utopias for the world. They circled around themselves, in search of individual forms of expression. This produced a confusing diversity of styles and trends: Abstract Expressionism, Geometrical Abstraction, and Concrete Abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism appeared in the United States following the end of World War II in 1945. Abstract expressionist painters, such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, attempted to transmit basic emotions through vivid colors, bold forms, and spontaneous methods of dripping and flinging paint – all without recognizable subjects. Jackson Pollock gave the people who looked at his paintings the following advice: “They should try to receive what the painting has to offer them and not bring to it a main content and a preconceived opinion which they want to have confirmed”. Pollock brought about the fall of traditional painting in the truest sense of the word. Instead of painting at the easel, he spread his canvases on the floor. When Pollock let the paint drip from thick brushes and pierced tin cans on to the canvas lying on the floor, when he threw and sprayed the paint with wild swings of his arm, and ran across his painting over and over again like a little dervish, one could not really speak of ‘painting’ in the traditional sense. For this reason, one critic called his work, appropriately enough, ‘Action Painting’. This description makes it plain what Pollock was doing: painting was an action, a real act, however trance-like. The painter could never predict what the final product would look like. Pollock found the titles for his works afterwards – depending on what the structure of his ‘dripping’ reminded him of. But in most cases he just gave them a number or the date on which they were painted. Or he just left them ‘untitled’ to give the observer a completely free hand.