A History of Abstraction

now I raise the old, old hymn to Dionysos
— Euripides/William Arrowsmith

ἰὼ πῦρ πνειόντων
χοράγ᾽ ἄστρων, νυχίων
φθεγμάτων ἐπίσκοπε,
παῖ Διὸς γένεθλον

chorus-leader of the fire-breathing stars
you who watch over the voices of the night
child born of Zeus
— Sophocles, to Dionysos, from the final choral ode in Antigone

“Abstract art remains misunderstood by the majority of the viewing public. Most people, in fact, consider it meaningless.”¹ These words are from Maurice Tuchman, one of the few commentators brave enough to state the obvious truth. There are many reasons for the failure of understanding which Tuchman describes, but I single out one. Our culture has assumed a form, call it “materialistic consumerism”, which is in fundamental conflict with the aims and revelations of Abstract painting. By way of explication, I am going to tell a story which is an outlandish affront to conventional art history.

I begin my account by reference to ancient cultural conceptions of our spiritual nature. Various forms of the religion associated with the worship of Dionysos predate classical Greek philosophy and Hellenistic rationalism.² Dionysos was associated with the Elusinian Mysteries and the Delphic Oracle, and with mystical and visionary experience of several other kinds. As Carl Kerényi writes in his definitive study Dionysos, “visionary power does not seem to have been equally distributed among men; it was more abundant in ancient times and has steadily become rarer.”³ Worship of Dionysos focused on ecstatic union with the God as source. Dionysos represented the conjunction of death and life, night and day, tragedy and comedy, destruction and creation. His outward manifestations included ancient Greek theatre and wine. His religion is the fundamental platform of Western Culture, buried beneath later Platonic and Christian constructions, but never entirely forgotten. Indeed, Christianity based itself on the earlier religion. All of Christianity’s most potent symbolism (blood, wine, the vine, the ambiguous relationship of father to son; rebirth, resurrection, the indestructibility of life) are the stolen fire of Dionysos. Christianity, however, fears its own shadow. Dionysos is the serpent, and duality is at the heart of his meaning.⁴ Christianity, therefore, split the God in two.⁵

The rationalist aspects of Western Culture crystalised in the eighteenth century, resulting in another split of the kind which has come to characterise it: the definitive division of Art from Science.⁶ The extremity of this divide made some artists begin to feel that something essential had been lost, and gave rise to Romanticism, which was the nineteenth century’s reaction against Rationalism. The Romantic composer Richard Wagner called for a new art work, “the art work of the future”⁷ to be based on the art work of the past, namely ancient Greek theatre. Wagner’s triumphant ability to create a new sensually and psychologically alert form of music gave his call great power and made it more than mere theory. The ecstasy in Wagner’s music is the original ecstasy; his work was proof that it was possible for the modern artist to return to the Bacchanalian source.⁸ Significantly, Wagner was also one of the first artists to understand that our increasingly materialistic way of life was damaging our artistic fertility and degrading the quality of our artistic forms.

The writings of the nineteenth century German philosopher, Artur Schopenhauer, were a seminal influence on the development of Wagner’s artistic thought. Schopenhauer understood that the cultural values of the world are illusory. He believed that Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity contain profound religious truths, but in very disguised form, parallelling the Mysteries of the classical world. Surprisingly, for a nineteenth century European, he believed that not only art (particularly music), but also sexual union, are mystical pathways to a deeper understanding of being.⁹ The idea that freedom from the ego and union with the source can be achieved through sensual and sexual activity is an extremely Dionysian one. It was Schopenhauer who first formulated that “all art aspires to the condition of music”,¹⁰ a dictum which would have fundamental impact on the development of Abstraction. Furthermore, it was Schopenhauer’s influence on the creative gestation of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde which first introduced Buddhist thought into the Western European cultural domain.

Wagner and Schopenhauer were at the vanguard of a changing nineteenth century cultural climate. Their ideas deeply influenced Kandinsky, the most radical and innovative of all the early Abstractionists. As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, spiralling social change cast many old paradigms into question. There was new interest in Spiritualism, Theosophy, and in numerous other alternatives to the Christian model. Contact with Eastern religions and philosophical ideas increased dramatically. Freud initiated a new attitude to the human psyche, which Jung clarified by reference to collective unconscious and archetypal cultural forms. All this helped mould the forms which Abstraction would take.¹¹

When it comes to considering the art of painting in the nineteenth century, it is important first of all to state the obvious. Photography was beginning to usurp the role which had belonged to painting alone since the dawn of time. The unsettling effect that this had on contemporary painters cannot be overstated. Painting was experiencing difficulty on several other fronts at the same time. European painters had been working with the same language of tonal forms ever since Leonardo perfected them late in the Quattrocento. What had been vital and youthful in the sixteenth century had become as tired as any other three hundred year old marriage of convenience. By the nineteenth century, tonal realism had become a stultifying institution. Textural dynamics, bold colouring, painterly handling, energy of drawing – the Academy suppressed them all. Paintings sanctioned by the Academy were not only the most boring paintings ever made, they were also twisted and weird. Nothing could have been further from Wagnerian sensuality or the sexual candour of Schopenhauer.

In the great age of oil painting, Titian, and his many followers through the centuries, had developed the sprezzatura manner to a pinnacle of artistic perfection. The significance of sprezzatura (rough handling) is that it draws attention to its own means: paint is handled as paint, brush marks remain brush marks. In such painting, the artist seeks to reveal a profound association between means (paint on canvas) and idea (the subject revealed by light). By refusing to erase all evidence of the processes involved in creation, the artist reveals the true nature of the work of art. This celebration of materiality had disappeared by the middle of the nineteenth century. Turner was the last great exponent of sprezzatura, and his work, great though it may have been, exhibited a new failing: his artistic conception exceeded the limits of his materials.¹² Painting was no longer being taught; artists were becoming ignorant of materials, which they now purchased from suppliers whose interest was in profit over artistic quality.¹³ The dilemmas of nineteenth century painting which I have outlined here were related to the new commercial outlook of our culture. This was the setting from which Abstraction arose.

Today, the birth of Abstraction has become almost impossible to comprehend due to an astonishing “oversight”. The development of Symbolist painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has simply been left out of art history,¹⁴ even though every one of the pioneers of Abstraction were Symbolists before they developed into Abstractionists. The fact that it suddenly seemed essential to distinguish between Realism and Symbolism is, in itself, yet another example of an increasingly divided Western psyche. If I try to answer the question “why did Symbolism disappear from art history?”, I have to concede I am at a loss. Perhaps certain early Symbolist paintings can seem thin, more like illustration of idea than clothing of the truth. However, looking closely at their depictions of ancient Greece, and at the beautiful nude figures who inhabit their landscapes, it seems to me that Symbolist painters sought to create a doorway between contemporary life and our ancient origins. European artists had been representing classical mythology for centuries, but the representations of the Symbolists strove at something far more poetic. They were created out of a tangible emotion: a sense of loss. In his important essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Martin Heidegger wrote that “the rootlessness of Western thought begins” with the “translation of Greek names into Latin”.¹⁵ I believe that our rootlessness began even earlier, with the rise of Platonism. I believe that Symbolist painters intuitively sought to return to the point at which our rootlessness began, the point at which we abandoned our visions.

Modernism has been obsessed with distinctions based merely on style. When I speak of the Symbolists, however, I do not mean only Chavannes, the Post Impressionists, the Nabis. I mean Nineteenth Century Northern Schools, German Romantic and Symbolist painters, the German Expressionists, Cezanne’s bathers, early Matisse, the Italians of the 1930s and, ultimately, Picasso, whose mature work is a kind of flowering of Symbolism into artistic greatness (albeit a Symbolism of sexuality and psychology more than spirituality). The best of today’s painters, such as Sigmar Polke and Julian Schnabel, are still progeny of nineteenth century Symbolism. In fact we are still in Symbolism, the movement that has been left out of art history books.

And yet, Symbolism was just the forging of a key. Possessed of superhuman strength, Kandinsky and Mondrian used that key to unlock the doorway to Abstraction. A vision of our own undivided original selves poured out through that door, carried here on the Cretan wind. The original form of that vision had been The Bull. These days it appears in the suburbs in the guise of The Vampire. To Kandinsky and Mondrian, it appeared as light, as aetherial incorporeal reality, almost disembodied from the world of physical forms. And why not? It was, after all, their vision, for which they had waited two and a half thousand years.

Just as we exist physically, however, our spiritual lives are embodied in sensual forms. So it is with painting: the essential nature of painting is a profound embodiment. In painting, the energy of the artist’s body (being in the world) is transmitted directly into the art work. This is intrinsic: good drawing is dependent on satisfactory functioning of this process. Here I do not refer to meaningless so-called “gesturalism”, but to transmission of the life force, the heart beat, the movement of the arm, the dance of moving through space (which is our existence). At the same time, paint itself is also embodied and physical, which is to say: substance in the world. Paintings are not made from “pure colour”; artists’ colours are substance. Paintings do not spring from the mind, nor are they disembodied projection of the artist’s ideas or spiritual visions. Painting embodies direct experience in and of the world. Paint is like our food and our excretion (which is part of the secret power of Pollock).¹⁶ For all these reasons it is vitally important for the artist to come to a deep understanding of materials, and to engage in the most serious investigation of technique and forms possible. By its own admission, the role of the New York school was to restore the tragic element to Abstraction.¹⁷ This meant that the American Abstractionists renewed the Dionysian function of their art, revealing the spiritual in the physical. Since then? Home decorating, an extended expedition to the Shopping Mall, the rise of Mickey Mouse and Uncle Scrooge, the cultural “appropriation” of “abstract forms”, and the demeaning triumph of irony.

For a hundred and fifty years, artists have asked themselves “what is the antidote to the dilemma of materialism?” Abstraction is born of, and embodies, this question. Donald Kuspit develops the theme: “The enemy of today’s spiritual abstract art is not simply the ongoing ‘harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy’ and a society that is determined to reduce art to another ordinary communication, but also the unconscious inclination of much art itself to take the line of least resistance to materialistic society by becoming facile, if slightly unconventional, communication. It is the desire to enter the mainstream of societal communication itself that must be resisted, for it usurps inner necessity. The difficulty for abstract art today is to sustain the sense of spiritual Stimmung in the face of a society that assimilates abstract art as simply another kind of communication and so makes us insensitive and unresponsive to it.”¹⁸ Our artists have been confused, hurt, disenfranchised, and finally seduced, by the spirit of our times. Ironic distance is the love child of this uneasy encounter. I offer one example. Gerhardt Richter’s renowned “abstractions” are powerful, but they are so entangled with irony that they are not actually Abstract painting as defined here. Rather, they function as some kind of “art world” commentary. This level of irony draws tremendous attention to the self importance of the creator.

Heidegger said this: “in great art … the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys himself in the creative process for the work of art to emerge”.¹⁹ I have related Abstract painting to connections between spiritual enquiry and the actualities of the physical world, that is, to Dionysian revelation. In Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchæ, Teiresias gives the following account of the nature of Dionysos: “this god is a prophet; the Bacchic ecstasy / And frenzy hold a strong prophetic element. / When he fills, irresistibly, a human body, / He gives those so possessed power to foretell the future.”²⁰ The poet describes a visionary state of creative inspiration. He does not speak of the genius of the individual, but of the genius which the God lends to the individual. When Donald Kuspit writes of the need for the Abstract painter to be “silent”,²¹ I interpret this as linking Dionysian creative rapture (as described by Euripides) to the words of Heidegger which opened this paragraph. We are afraid of silence, yet silence, the extinguishing of the ego, is the opening. It is Heidegger’s creative “passageway”, the doorway of Kandinsky and Mondrian.

Our fear of silence is our fear of death. The ultimate meaning of ancient Greek tragedy is simple: all life is tragic, it ends in death. Materialism is the culture which devotes itself to the avoidance of this simple reality, the ending of the material. Abstraction is a profound investigation into physical materials in the world (“artists’ materials”). The Abstract painter’s deepest fear is that his or her work might be “meaningless”. This mirrors the fear that life itself might be meaningless, that death cancels out the significance of life. As deep as our fear of death is, there is no passing through into creative silence without, along the way, confronting the fundamental nature of such fear. I have already alluded to an inherent danger in Abstract practice, that it can easily degenerate into empty decoration. This shallowness characterises much contemporary “abstraction”, because the confrontation I describe above is avoided altogether. Kandinsky, the father of non geometric Abstraction, foresaw all this. He agonised over his path and confronted such fears. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote that “a terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities stretched before me. And most important of all: what is to replace the missing object? The danger of ornament revealed itself clearly to me; the dead semblance of stylised forms I found merely repugnant. … It took a very long time before I arrived at the correct answer to the question: what is to replace the object?”²²

As an Abstract painter, there are two questions which people always ask me. “What is in your mind when you paint?” and “What are you trying to express?” At last, I can give the same answer to both questions. Nothing. And this is the opening to everything. The artist is a vehicle. Abstract painting is the temple. The God is present as a revelation. These are the modern Mysteries. The final words belong to Heidegger, who spoke them seventy five years ago: “for us today, the beautiful is the relaxing, what is restful and thus intended for enjoyment. Art then belongs in the domain of the pastry chef … And yet art is the opening up of the Being of beings”.²³