Historical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and Technology

Historical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and Technology David R.Topper Readers are invited to send information to the section Editor at the Department of History, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 2E9, Canada. Partisans of abstract art continually point out that even realist art is abstract. No artist can draw all the accidents of nature; thus artists are compelled to ‘abstract’ only certain features of the world. There is even talk of late that photography is a form of abstract art. Perhaps, therefore, we should retreat a bit and reconsider abstract art itself: to that end my comments that follow on the articles about the cubist artist Juan Gris and the abstract expressionists Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock are directed. I also comment on an article about Picasso in which the author asserts that photography influenced Picasso’s cubist art; this article alone should compel a reassessment of the concept of abstraction. A companion notion to ‘abstract ideas’ is ‘metaphysical entities’. I discuss an article on the surrealist artist de Chirico as a point of departure for approaching abstraction from another angle. de Chirico applied the term ‘metaphysical’ to his early works; this term had traditionally been associated only with philosophy. C. Green, “Synthesis and the ‘Synthetic Process’ in the Painting of Juan Gris 1915-19”, Art History 5, 87 (March, 1982). Abstract art is etymologically trapped. By definition it is the product of abstract thought; thus, the artist supposedly arrives at the finished product by a process of abstracting the essence of reality from the phenomenal world, the ‘lived-world’. But this hypothesis-in fact, the abstracting procedure itself-is fraught with problems, for the process leads into a conceptual labyrinth. Indeed, pondering even the simplest object gives rise to almost insurmountable difficulties. Consider the nearest flower: What is the artist to abstract as its essence-lines, colors, textures, forms, distinctive features or something else? Is abstract art really abstract? If not, what then is it? Preliminary answers may be gleaned from history-that depository of images and ideas wherein rests empirical knowledge of the creative process. Two recent articles on abstract artists-Green on Gris and Polcari on Still-are worthwhile starting points. Green commences his analysis of Gris’ ‘synthetic process’ with a crucial quotation . In 1921 Gris wrote: “I work with the elements of the spirit.. .. I try to make concrete that which is abstract ...My art is an art of synthesis, a deductive art ... Cezanne makes a cylinder from a bottle, [but] I ... make a bottle (a specific bottle) out of a cylinder” (p. 87). The reference to Cezanne is instructive: Cezanne sees a bottle in the lived-world and ‘makes’ a cylinder in his painting. Gris begins, however, not with the lived-world but with the art-world; Gris draws a cylinder on his canvas and from this ‘makes’ a bottle. This ‘specific’bottle is ‘concrete’at least in the art-world. The imitation of nature therefore was neither the origin nor the goal of his art. At the threshold of his art were shapes-forms that were manipulated and adjusted so that “they can be read as objects” (p. 87). Once formed, these pictorial objects (such as the previous cylinder), whi‘ch Green calls ‘object-ideas’, were then the basis of objects in subsequent paintings. Using numerous examples, Green supplies sufficient evidence to support his conclusion that, in this stageof development, Gris “moved from the invention of distinct object-ideas to their development and regrouping in new compositions, the process of conception remaining very free ... The results are often synthetic, but their beginnings do not, after all, liein abstraction” (p. 91). In the next stage of his work Gris, interestingly enough, went back to the lived-world “to refurbish his pictorial ideas” and to develop newly modified object-ideas from which further paintings could be (and were) made (p. 97). But in neither stage of his work could Gris’ art be seen as incorporating an abstractive process. S. Polcari, “The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford Still”, Art InternationaI25,18 (May-June, 1982) Abstract art, as noted in the foregoing review, is theoretically problematic. The following is a continuation of those remarks. Clyfford...