Wassily Kandinsky’s
“Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle),”
from the site of the National Gallery of Art
As the heated comments on my most recent post indicate, the mere mention of abstract painting — remember, we’re talking painting, here, not Sarah Palin — sends some people into a tizzy. What I wrote a few days ago was no more than a small, personal story from which I drew some implications about people tending to see “art” when they’re told they’re looking at it, and the odd predicament we find ourselves in when social situations test our ability to tell the unvarnished truth. I was a little nonplussed, therefore, to see my words open up a Pandora’s box about the validity of abstract painting as a whole.
I’ve been an abstract painter for my whole painting career, and I believe in its power to be very beautiful and moving to those who are open to it. Nevertheless, I’m the first to admit that to love abstract pictures the way I do is an acquired taste.
Like many artists, I knew from an early age that I had an innate ability to draw realistically. I could always make a doggie look like a doggie. In my “lab” high school on a college campus, I drew alongside college students in their life drawing classes. In my own college drawing classes I could make doggies look even more like doggies than when I was in third grade, and do pretty accurate portraits of people. Verisimilitude, mimesis, imitation (all the skills of proportion, shading, detail, plus clean execution): I’m good at these things. Today, I use this ability only in demos in the drawing and painting classes I teach.
(Why, you might ask, if I’m an abstract painter who believes deeply in the power of abstraction, do I teach perception-based drawing and painting? The answer is because a) I believe in conveying to students the full range of knowledge about making a variety of kinds of pictures, and b) I agree that perceptual drawing and painting is a good common foundation for students who’ll end up doing everything from making abstract sculpture to designing Web sites.)
But like many abstract painters who have a natural talent for realism, once I got serious about painting (somewhere around the age of 20), I never considered making realism my style. Making art based on the skills of imitation didn’t speak to me, personally, or my times. Multiple technologies — the camera, in particular — have lessened the meaning and awe we derive from hand-wrought visual imitations of nature. Although I still love looking at old-master painters, and am in awe at their accomplishments, I have no desire to go down their road.
In music, hardly any composers ever bothered imitating sounds from the “real world.” And as Walter Pater noted, all art aspires to the condition of music — a famous quotation I’ve always interpreted as meaning that all art aspires to move audiences directly, the way music — even though it’s inherently abstract — does. Thanks to 5th-century B.C. Greek artists — and later on, Renaissance artists — Western painting became obsessed with imitating nature. Other cultures have seen a different purpose for painting.
I’m deeply drawn to the challenge of generating meaning purely out of my visual imagination (some associations, conscious or not, are of course inevitable), and personally excited by the bright colors available to an abstract painter who eschews representation. Artists tied to depicting the natural world, in which the colors are, relatively speaking, less intense than those in the invented world of abstract painting, miss half the joy of color, in my opinion.
Although, as I’ve said above, abstract painting is an acquired taste, it requires viewers with an unacquired taste. In order to appreciate abstract painting — or even see it as art — a viewer has to let go of acquired ideas about a painting’s necessarily having to be a picture of something from the real world.
Since painting of any sort is art, not morality, it has no “oughts.” It succeeds not on the basis of arguments in words, but rather to the extent that it pleases an audience—be it a mass audience or a more circumscribed one. Abstract painting has a smaller audience than that for the paintings of Thomas Kinkade or Andy Warhol, but it’s generally an intelligent, sophisticated audience, well-informed about art, and excited by the beauties — both obvious and idiosyncratic — available only within abstract painting.
Western modern abstract painting is about to reach its 100th birthday. The “first” (who can know for sure?) abstract paintings were made around 1910 by Vasily Kandinsky and — surprise! — a Chicago artist named Maniere Dawson. It’s hardly cutting edge anymore (that dubious distinction falls to varieties of conceptual and installation art), and no abstract painter I know does it to be perceived as avant-garde. To even have to defend abstract painting in 2008 feels like beating the dry bones of some very dead critics who were reactionary even a half-century ago.
I have no particular animus against realist painting — although I know some dogmatic abstract painters who do. The Spanish realist painter Antonio López-García, for instance, is a flat-out great artist. But even the most skilled-at-verisimilitude realist painter, e.g., Adolphe William Bouguereau or one of those “Classical Realists” from up Minnesota way, can make art that’s so clichéd, sentimental, or just plain inert, that it’s painful to the eye and soul.
Look people, good art of any kind is difficult enough to make, to find, and to derive meaning from, without having to first make your way through unnecessary categorical roadblocks. On my hypothetical desert island, I’ll be hanging the abstract paintings of Tom Nozkowski and Elizabeth Murray on the trunk of that lonely palm tree.
