3 - Abstract, ‘abstract’: modernist visual art

Summary

The life of modern cultured man is gradually turning away from the natural: life is becoming more and more abstract.

Piet Mondrian, ‘The New Plastic in Painting’ (1917: PMCW 28)

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something … Nor is there any ‘figurative’ and ‘nonfigurative’ art. Everything appears to us in the guise of a ‘figure’. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by means of symbolic ‘figures’.

Pablo Picasso, ‘Conversation with Picasso’ (1935: HW 508)

It's what I always come back to: the painter should devote himself entirely to the study of nature and try to produce pictures that are educative.

Paul Cézanne, in the words of Joachim Gasquet (1991: 165)

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

Piet Mondrian, ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’ (1936: PMCW 289)

In 1980, the curators of the London exhibition ‘Abstraction: Towards a New Art – Painting 1910–1920’ borrowed a phrase from Robert Delaunay to argue that early modernist visual abstraction was not a style but a ‘“change of understanding”’ or ‘philosophical change’; they sought to examine ‘the process by which artists gradually evolved a vocabulary of abstract form’ (Vergo 1980: 12). ‘Vocabulary’ points in two directions here. Metaphors of language are commonly used to refer to the painterly techniques of abstract art and in this, perhaps curiously, to infer language as a self-referential rather than communicative system. Yet, as Leah Dickerman notes, modernist artists were also developing an actual discourse on abstraction. Dickerman refers to the ‘torrent of words’ accompanying early visual abstraction: ‘titles, manifestos, statements of principles, performative declarations, discursive catalogues, explanatory lectures, and critical writing by allies’, as if abstraction ‘made it more incumbent on the artist to write, and also to develop novel systems for the delivery of text’ (Dickerman 2013: 4). Abstraction constitutes a new model of intellectual work in which words supplement the application of paint to canvas. Visual modernism's abstraction thereby becomes ambiguous, designating formal experimentation with the apparatuses of painting but also the intimate role in this of philosophy and understanding.