Paths to Abstraction

Modern Option 1: Topic 3

paths to abstraction

MALEVICH MONDRIAN KANDINSKY BRANCUSI

Cubism, abstraction and reality towards 1910, Cubism tended to a reduction of complex irregular forms to geometric regularity

this degree of abstraction conflicted with the Cubists’ insistence that Cubism was essentially a realist art subsequent retreat from abstraction to ‘reconnect’ with observed reality

Pablo Picasso, Standing Female Nude (1910)

Picasso, Nude (1910) — complex shapes are reduced to straight lines and arcs

ENGLAND Vorticism Ben Nicholson

ITALY Futurism

HOLLAND De Stijl

RUSSIA Suprematism

Piet Mondrian

Kazimir Malevich

ROMANIA Constantin Brancusi

Elsewhere in Europe, however, artists were quick to commit themselves to this “world of pure geometry” first suggested, but then rejected, by the Cubists.

Cubism beyond Paris outside Paris, acceptance of Cubism’s radicalism was most fervent in those countries whose own traditions appeared to have been exhausted Futurism in Italy; Vorticism in England

in Russia, acceptance of the avant-garde helped to draw the country into alignment with European contemporary experience collection of Sergei Shchukhin, containing 54 Picassos and 26 Cézannes exhibitions like those of the Jack of Diamonds group (1912) showing works of Picasso, Gleizes and Léger

Kazimir Malevich Russia (1878 - 1935)

Kazimir Malevich Woodcutter (1911) forms are reduced to smooth geometric volumes ‘robotic’ appearance influence of Léger in… the simplification of forms e.g. Woman Sewing (1909-10) depiction of forceful physical energy and movement e.g. Nudes in the Forest (1910)

Léger

Léger

Malevich

Woman Sewing (1909-10) — cropped

Nudes in the Forest (1910) — detail

Woodcutter (1911) — cropped

Kazimir Malevich Scissors Grinder (1912-13) almost Futurist evocation of dynamic energy: the painting was subtitled Principle of Flickering as in Léger, the human figure has become a machine combines Léger’s Woman in Blue and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Léger

Duchamp

Malevich

Woman in Blue (1912) — cropped

Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

Scissors Grinder (1912-13) — cropped

Millet, Wood Sawyers (1850-52) Millet, Gleaners (1857)

“Ironically, Malevich’s woodcutter and scissors grinder, for all their machine implications, are essentially nineteenthcentury genre figures taken from the very non-industrialized peasant community of a czarist society.”

Courbet, Stone Breakers (1850)

— Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 30 December, 1915

After a brief foray into Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, Malevich founded the purely abstract Suprematist movement.

Black Square (1915)

“the zero of form�

0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 30 December, 1915

‘0.10 : The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting’

Suprematism ‘0.10 — The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting’ — December 1915 Malevich launches the Suprematist movement by exhibiting 46 totally abstract paintings: “With the revolutionary zeal and idealism that prophesied the political revolution soon to come, Malevich proclaimed the new art of Suprematism, which denuded the still impure geometries of his Cubist work into perfect circles and squares and presented these absolutes as the virgin alphabet of a new pictorial language that would never again be tainted by contact with any realities beyond itself.”

— Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

Kazimir Malevich Black Square (1915) an abrupt change from all that had preceded it and not the result of a sustained pictorial development… revolution, not evolution

the emblem of Suprematism iconic quality: as an expression of ‘the absolute’ it has a quasi-religious presence

The Fourth Dimension painting was finally freed from reality and thus entered an “exalted realm of pure thought” Malevich was profoundly influenced by a host of late-nineteenth century philosophical and speculative literature, and ideas about the fourth dimension… the fourth dimension represented a space outside sensory perception, more ‘real’ than our own three-dimensional reality it involved or implied a recognition of infinity paradoxically, infinite space was often equated with flatness (as three-dimensional, illusionistic space is to be distrusted)

Kazimir Malevich Black Square (1915) the black square is a static form: it hovers against its white support both its insistent flatness and the white support suggest the infinite Hegel: the spirit detached from nature becomes pure universal form, the essence

Kazimir Malevich Black Square, Red Square (1915) later, in 1920, Malevich was to identify three stages in his Suprematist paintings: black = economy (i.e. of thought, the reduction of ideas) red = revolution white = pure action

Suprematism and flight Malevich believed that Suprematism was an art about flight: not the machines (in a Futurist sense) but the potential for extraterrestrial travel and freedom from accepted ideas of time and space

photographs of aeroplanes flying in formation and aerial views of towns form the compositional basis of his later ‘red’ paintings Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane in Flight (1915)

Kazimir Malevich White Square on White (1918) the climax of a series of ‘fading away’ white-on-white paintings frequent use of mystical titles (e.g. Mystic Waves from Outer Space) white was also suggestive of infinity, a preoccupation of the fourth dimensionalists

Piet Mondrian Holland (1872 - 1944)

Mondrian, Summer Night (1906/7)

Mondrian and the Dutch landscape tradition

— John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Pond near Saasveld (1906-07) Mill on the Gein (1906-07) Landscape with Trees and Water (1907)

“While remaining within the context of a conservative Dutch landscape tradition, his paintings [of 1906-07] now start to catch and hold the eye… These paintings are totally still and devoid of movement, yet they have about them a feeling of suppressed drama… Looking at them, we sense that something is about to happen.”

Mondrian, The Red Tree (1908)

Mondrian, van Gogh and the mystical

— Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

van Gogh, Cypresses (1889)

The Red Tree Shock of the New, p 204

Mondrian, detail of The Red Tree (1908)

“Like van Gogh’s attitude toward nature, Mondrian’s was mystical, sensing an underlying divinity in the spectacle of landscape; and like van Gogh’s late cypresses, Mondrian’s heroic tree writhes and quivers with an organic energy that would guide the spectator from the world of objective perception to an experience that is cosmic in its implications.”

both Mondrian and Malevich adhered to Theosophy, a cult that flourished during the 1890s and early C20th best described as a sort of Western Buddhism, its goal was transcendental knowledge Theosophy’s cosmology provided the occult framework for Mondrian’s innate mysticism: he confided that he got ‘everything’ from it

Portrait of H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophical Society

Mondrian and Theosophy

Mondrian and Cubism Mondrian, detail of The Grey Tree (1912)

— Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

Detail of The Grey Tree (1912) Tableau No. 2, Composition No.VII (1913) Flowering Apple Tree (1912)

“Profoundly inspired by Theosophy, Mondrian’s thinking tended to reduce all experience to two opposing forces — positive and negative, masculine and feminine, dynamic and static — and it was precisely through the assertion of horizontal and vertical axes that he felt he could articulate this philosophy in visual terms. For him, the intellectual and sensuous geometry of Cubism was a means of unveiling the spiritual geometry of the universe.”

in mid-1911 Mondrian visited Paris where he must have seen Cubist works: by the end of the year, he had moved there he was never a Cubist and was not interested in the multiple viewpoint he made full use of the rectilinear grid or ‘scaffoldings’, seeing them as a means of destroying “the distinction between figure and ground, between matter and non-matter”

Mondrian, Tableau No. 2, Composition No.VII (1913) — cropped

Mondrian and Cubism (i)

Piet Mondrian Tableau No. 2, Composition No. VII (1913) image and surrounding space remain strictly frontal, and assert the flat picture plane the planes hover in front of or behind each other but are not angled in space the black dividing lines of the grid already begin to read as elements in their own right

Tableau No. 2, Composition No.VII Paths to the Absolute, p 21

Cézanne, Gingerpot with Pomegranate and Pears (1890-93) Mondrian, Still Life with Gingerpot I (1911-12) — cropped

— John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Mondrian, Still Life with Gingerpot II (1911-12) — cropped

“As a prelude to his immersion in Cubism he turned to Cézanne, and through Cézanne he learnt to give equal pictorial weight to every single area of the picture surface.”

Mondrian and nature Mondrian, detail of Pier and Ocean (1915)

— Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art

Ocean 5 (The Sea) (1914) Sea (Starry Sky above the Sea) (1914) Pier and Ocean (1915) — cropped

“So deeply was Mondrian immersed in the mystic experience of nature that his Cubist work, with few exceptions, avoided the Parisian repertoire of stilllife objects and the human figure.

Instead, he continued his earlier devotion to the study of trees, earth, sky and water.”

The Ocean Series initiated by a return in 1914 to Holland where he again fell under the spell of the sea at Scheveningen he produces the ‘plus and minus’ series, so-called because of his use of short vertical and horizontal marks to describe the scene

the lines themselves and their relationship to the ground become the subject: “their pulse, their rhythm have become the pictorial image”.

The Pier at Scheveningen

Mondrian fills the Cubist oval format with a network of vertical and horizontal lines “which touch, cross, or hover independently to create a feeling of perfect equilibrium”.

De Stijl de Stijl means, literally, ‘the style’ began as a magazine (1915) for which Mondrian wrote on Neo-Plasticism

it advocated pure abstraction and reduction to the essentials of form and colour, using… vertical and horizontal compositions the primary colours, black and white

De Stijl Volume 1 (1915)

de Stijl proclaimed a utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order

Piet Mondrian Composition (1916) signals a return to colour black lines define the colour areas but do not always correspond to them thus they begin to assume an independent existence in doing so, they become equally important

Mondrian and Cubism (ii)

the architectural references almost disappear: these works are a logical extension of Analytical Cubism to almost pure abstraction clues such as the arches remain but disappear in later variations

Mondrian, Church at Domburg (1914)

despite the almost complete shift to pure abstraction, the roots of works like Composition (1916) lie in studies Mondrian had made of the faรงade of the church in Domburg

Mondrian, Church at Domburg (1914)

Mondrian and Cubism (ii)

Piet Mondrian Composition in Colour B (1917) possibly still derived from architectural motifs but now verging on pure abstraction

Mondrian and the grid Mondrian, Composition with Colour Planes and Grey Lines 1 (1918) — cropped

— John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Mondrian’s studio at 26 Rue du Départ, Paris, 1926

“We all live in our minds to a greater or lesser extent, and the surroundings of many of us reflect our personal concerns and tastes. In the cases of Mondrian, however, the environments he created for himself were diagrams of his mind, and he lived in them in spiritual, if not physical, comfort.”

Piet Mondrian Composition with Colour Planes and Grey Lines 1 (1918) started before his move to Paris in 1919, this establishes Mondrian’s characteristic method of composition the grid is irregular but unrelentingly rectilinear Mondrian uses soft greys as well as white and black

Piet Mondrian Composition A; Composition with Black, Red, Grey, Yellow and Blue (1920) establishes red as a colour in its own right in Theosophy, red was seen as earthbound and sensual blues are tied to the blacks and yellows to the whites and pale greys all colours now have a much greater luminosity

Piet Mondrian Composition A; Composition with Black, Red, Grey, Yellow and Blue (1920) Process: scientific analysis reveals that the linear composition — the dark lines — are the least changed during painting the colours of the shapes, however, are subject to constant change

Piet Mondrian Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey (1920) resolves the prior imbalance between line and shape: the lines have been thickened and rendered in black the lines are now equal in pictorial importance to the shapes

Mondrian and Cubism (iii) despite the apparently vast distance separating them, Mondrian’s mature work from the 1920s on has its genesis in Analytical Cubism… in Mondrian, unlike Malevich and Kandinsky, separate forms do not rest on a ground plane: there is instead an ambiguous interlocking of shapes and spatial relationships as in Cubism, no area is complete in itself: each relies on its relationships — spatial, compositional, chromatic, tonal, associative — to the others

Piet Mondrian Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow and Black (1929) through the 1920s Mondrian ‘purified’ his vision: by 1929, he had reached a highpoint a key feature of this phase was the purity of his whites: he had previously used subtle shades of grey “…[his] art becomes harder, sharper, more abrasive…”1 1. John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Piet Mondrian Composition with Yellow and Double Line (1932) through the 1930s, his works take on a new ‘syncopation’ unhappy with his blacks, he introduces the double line the lines are now thinner white now reads as a line between the double black lines

Piet Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) In 1940, Mondrian moved to New York. the title reveals the influence of jazz on his work experimentation with colour in the linear elements line is broken into shapes: it is no longer independent of colour

Vasily Kandinsky Russia (1866 - 1944)

Kandinsky and folk art 1889, Kandinsky is invited to study the folk art of Vologda, 482 km north of Moscow

this and his own faith (Russian Orthodoxy) led him to see both life and art “in terms of clashes, contrasts and fusions�1 1. John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Deserted church ,Vologda

he witnessed the vitality of folk art in the lives of the village people and how, along with religion, it infused their everyday life

“I shall never forget the great wooden houses covered with carving: they taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture… I felt surrounded on all sides by the painting…”

Wooden house façade,Vologda

— Vasily Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky Motley Life (1907) typifies his work after his Vologda experience (his “Russian� phase) represents the pageant of Russian life from medieval times onwards characters from pagan mythology are juxtaposed with symbols of Orthodoxy

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1896: he attended a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin — “he saw the music in terms of colour”

IMPROVISATION

COMPOSITION

Monet, Haystacks at Giverny (1891)

2

1896: he saw one of Monet’s Haystack paintings and was deeply moved without realising what it represented

Performance of Lohengrin, 2006

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1889: the trip to research folk art in Vologda

Church domes,Vologda

Kandinsky identified three formative influences in his early development…

— Vasily Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition IV (1911) — detail

“I saw all my colours in my mind; they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me. I did not dare use the expression that Wagner had painted 'my hour' musically.”

Kandinsky and Fauvism

Fauvism was an early C20th style that favoured distorted forms and flat patterns, painted in violent, often discordant colours whilst their subject matter was nature, their colour and free-handling of paint subverted naturalism

Henri Matisse, Madame Matisse (1905)

in 1906-07, Kandinsky moved to Paris to learn as a painter and discovered the work of the Fauves, especially Matisse

Vasily Kandinsky Murnau, Church (1910) typifies his Fauvist phase his Murnau works (1908-10) herald his arrival as a true modernist in their free handling and saturated colours, they anticipate the abstraction that follows

— Vasily Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky, Study for Murnau with Church II (1910) — rotated 90°

“I was returning, immersed in thought, from my sketching, when on opening the studio door, I was confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was composed entirely of bright colour patches.”

what Kandinsky described was one of his own Murnau landscapes standing on its side a painting’s literal subject matter was no longer important

Symbolism is also called ‘synthetism’ as it explores the interrelationships between the arts

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Breton Women at a Pardon (1888)

this stood in stark opposition to the dominant Realist school of Courbet and the Impressionists (mid-C19th on)

Paul Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon(1888)

Kandinsky was drawn to Symbolism, a late-C19th movement that stressed the mystical and evocative in art

Kandinsky and Music Kandinsky held a profound belief in the connection between painting and music music was abstract and independent of a representational function

Schoenberg’s atonal compositions broke with tradition and liberated sound in much the same way as he freed colour, shape and line from representation in his painting

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

specifically, he was moved by the work of Arnold Schoenberg‌

Vasily Kandinsky Impressions III (Concert) (1911) In 1911, Kandinsky attended a recital of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces (Opus 11) the next day he completed Impressions III (Concert) the work captures the direct relationship between sounds and colours that surrounded him

Kandinsky and Synesthesia Kandinsky shared the Symbolists’ interest in synesthesia — the direct transfer of reactions from one sense to another i.e. one might ‘see’ sounds or ‘hear’ colours colours also had associative values or metaphysical properties e.g. Kandinsky saw red as spiritual

“from 1908, the musicalization of painting through colour became a driving force in Kandinsky’s aesthetics”1 music was supreme because it was abstract and non-imitative Baudelaire had spoken of the musical properties of colour…

1. John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children, Sweet as oboes, green as meadows, — And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant, With power to expand into infinity, Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin, That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

Charles Baudelaire, extract from Correspondences (1857)

Perfumes, sounds, and colours correspond.

Kandinsky, Theosophy and Steiner like Malevich and Mondrian, Kandinsky was drawn to Theosophy a major influence was Rudolf Steiner, philosopher and founder of the German Theosophical Society…

Steiner and Theosophy helped to clarify his thoughts on abstraction…

1. John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Rudolph Steiner

“Steiner’s influence on German artistic and intellectual life, though short-lived, was to be incredibly potent”1

— Vasily Kandinsky (1911)

Wlliam Blake, Jacob’s Ladder (1800)

“A general interest in abstraction is being reborn in the superficial form of the movement towards the spiritual and in forms of occultism, spiritualism, monism, the ‘new’ Christianity, Theosophy and religion in its broadest sense”

A separation occurs between our objective outer perception and our subjective inner thoughtworld.

Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom (1894)

The mental process splits the world into two halves: into things outside me and into images of things within me.

Steiner and Perception Steiner believed that we have a dual experience of the world: our perception (what we see) our thinking (how we interpret what we see)

the material (or external) the spiritual (or internal)

The Church at Murnau

this parallels Kandinsky’s distinction between two ways of seeing things:

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the Improvisations were “impressions of an internal nature, chiefly unconscious”

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the Compositions conveyed “the inseparable, indispensable, unavoidable combination of the internal and external element, that is of content and form”

IMPROVISATION

COMPOSITION

Impressions III (Concert) 1911) - detail

the Impressions were direct impressions of external nature

Improvisation XIX (1911) - detail

1

IMPRESSION

Composition IV (1911) - detail

Kandinsky divided his work from 1909 into three categories…

Vasily Kandinsky Composition IV (1911) colour and line have almost become abstracted the lines do not always define colour areas; they do not act as contour similarly, colour does not always define objects line is harder to abstract than colour, as it defines

Vasily Kandinsky Composition IV (1911) Some representational elements remain, despite the abstraction: three Cossacks with lances stand at the centre a rainbow spans the valley between two hills above the rainbow, two horsemen joust

Vasily Kandinsky Composition V (1911) his most abstracted canvas yet as with other works from this time, its subject is apocalyptic — its theme is the Resurrection but Kandinsky maintains his ultimate goal was to create ‘pure painting’

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Der Blaue Reiter Kandinsky, detail of The Blue Rider (1903)

Der Blaue Reiter

the group aimed to express spiritual truths through art, but also promoted: modern and primitive art the connection between visual art and music the spiritual and symbolic in art

Kandinsky, cover design for Der Blaue Reiter almanac (1911)

in 1911, Kandinsky founded a group called Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’)

John Golding, Paths to the Absolute

Franz Marc Large Blue Horses (1911) Paul Klee, Red & White Domes (1914)

[This diversity] can perhaps best be viewed as unified by a desire to search out the magical, healing properties in the art of all cultures and ages.”

August Macke, Promenade (1914)

“The scope of the Blaue Reiter group was international and its breadth of vision still astounds… [The Almanac] illustrates a vast wealth of apparently disparate images, ranging from contemporary German, Russian and French art to undatable votive pieces and other folk art, and back to medieval and pre-Columbian art…

Russia, Revolution and Constructivism

Kandinsky and Constructivism In 1914 Kandinsky returned to Moscow and revolutions in art and politics.

1915: Malevich launches Suprematism Constructivism was a determinately revolutionary art movement‌ art was utilitarian: photomontage, collage, compasses and rulers were all means of rejecting the artist’s hand stressed the geometric (mechanical)

Lyubov Popova, Constructivist Composition (1921)

1917: October Bolshevik revolution

Nancy Spector, www.guggenheim.org

Liubov Popova, Artistic Architectonics (1916) – detail

Although he adopted some aspects of the geometrizing trends of Suprematism and Constructivism – such as overlapping flat planes and clearly delineated shapes – his belief in the expressive content of abstract forms alienated him from the majority of his Russian colleagues, who championed more rational, systematizing principles.”

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism (1916)

“The emphasis on geometric forms, promoted by artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova in an effort to establish a universal aesthetic language, inspired Kandinsky to expand his own pictorial vocabulary.

Liubov Popova, Artistic Architectonics (1916)

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism (1916)

At the Bauhaus (1921–33) In 1921 Kandinsky was appointed as a professor at the Bauhaus in Germany. the Bauhaus combined fine arts and applied design in its curriculum equally important is its pedagogical influence on teaching aesthetics In Kandinsky’s work, this period signals a shift to the geometric forms which he had previously mistrusted.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau

“form is function”

Vasily Kandinsky Composition VIII (1923) exemplifies his geometric compositions: Kandinsky felt it was one of the highpoints of his achievement it combines the experience of Russian revolutionary art with his pre-war work almost pure abstraction

Vasily Kandinsky Composition VIII (1923) the circle replaces the horse as his dominant motif Kandinsky felt the circle had cosmic implications: “Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.�

Kandinsky and Nature

he felt that art was governed by the same laws of nature as the universe biological dictionaries, zoological and embryological illustrations became a rich source of imagery for his work accounts for the wealth and variety of detailed smaller shapes

Embryology of Campanularia gelatinosa, from General Outline of the Organisation of the Animal Kingdom (1861)

Despite this geometry and abstraction, Kandinsky never turned his back on nature completely‌