It has often been held that Painting is a narrative art, but this is just a conceit. Painting is only narrative if the viewer already knows the story, or if the story is being explained to the viewer, in words, at time of viewing. “Narrative Painting” can only illustrate something already known. Although painting has often been representational, her representations are not narratives. The experience represented in traditional painting is symbolic and/or allegorical experience, but painting is deeper than mere representation.
Abstraction is a new branch of painting. It is painting without pretense to narrative, and painting without the use of symbols; it is focused on the materials, the making and the history of painting itself. The serious Abstract painter works with the inner principles of Painting, not with her outer forms, and not with the depiction or representation of subjects, themes or symbols. In order to be able to do this, such an artist must know more about techniques, history and forms than other painters, not less.
My paintings from 2007 onwards are Pure Abstraction. These paintings are built on my interest in the history and continuity of painting from the earliest prehistory until the present time. However, my experience in making these paintings is that they are an expression of Painting itself, not my own self expression. The following is an account which points towards what the “expression of Painting itself” might be, though this cannot be held either in words or in thought. I refrain from citation and academic apparatus, restricting discussion purely to works of art known personally to me at first hand. The sole exception to this rule is when I refer to prehistoric cave paintings, which I have had to study from books, since they have not been open for public viewing within my adult lifetime.
The origin of painting stretches back to the remote darkness of prehistoric caves; all the essential elements of the art are there right from the beginning. Paleolithic cave painting is ritual activity, sacred and magical in nature. I refer to Lascaux and Chauvet, the sites that I have studied most carefully. Lines and shapes were drawn straight onto the rockface. This was direct transmission of bodily experience, unmitigated through thought, but related to painting onto the human body. The rock paintings are absolutely present and felt; they are a deep meditation on being in the present. The materials used are charcoal, natural earths, bodily secretions, applied directly to the wall using hands and fingers. Made in the dark, the sense of touch is paramount. Experts argue endlessly on the meaning, context and intention of these paintings, but the meaning is clear, as carried in the work itself: the moods and the mystery of being; the revelation of the artistic process; cycles of Nature; fear and awe; fertility and death. These paintings were hidden and forgotten for tens of thousands of years, unseen from time of making until the twentieth century. The accompanying ritual elements, the music and the poetry, are lost.
The art of ancient Greece is simply a refinement of the same impetus. The Greek temple is a man made cave in which the Goddess or the God manifests. Greek paintings and sculptures are singular for the embodied physical energy that they carry. Greek sculpture has been especially important to the history of painting, because the Greek sculptors mastered the art of transmitting bodily energy into stone, which they sent on to the future. For this reason, their work has long been the very model of how to draw. The sculptures which have had the most lasting impact on my own work are the Hellenistic friezes from the Pergamon altar, which I have been going to see regularly since the 1980s (when the Pergamon Museum was still in East Berlin), and Classical sculptures such as the Aegina friezes in Munich. Regarding painting itself, the decorative forms of Greek cup painting have constantly influenced the broader directions of painting for two and a half thousand years. Black Figure and Red Figure paintings are characterised by the transmitted energy in their drawing, by vitality of composition, and by the rhythm and music of their artistic forms. Famous examples, such as the painting of Achilles and Patroclus in Berlin, are as spectacular as canvas paintings, but even the simplest cup is of great artistic interest.
All ancient Greek art is centred on direct expression of experience and on transcribing the meaning of being in the body. The poetry of ancient Greece has had the same continuous impact on the history of painting as Greek paintings themselves. Greek poetry retains its connection to ritual activity and to the ancient songs of the cave. It is heavy with the music of speaking, and with the rhythms of the Human body. These are: breathing, and the heart-beat. I think particularly of Homer, Sappho, Simonides of Keos, Pindar and Kallimakos, but also of the poetic dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The basic conceptions of Athenian Tragedy, which was a ritual theatre focused on the meaning of sex and death, are fundamental to the development of painting, and the Greek idea of the stage as a privileged space is as intrinsic to Painting as it is to Theatre. Images taken from the Tragedies and from the lyric poems have been painted ever since the poetry was first written.
The history of European Art has been the history of responding to ancient Greek forms. This necessity began in Rome, where the clarity and direct expression of Greek art were highly valued. We have the Romans to thank for most of our knowledge of Greek sculpture, and for most of the Greek poetry which survived the Christians. The art of the Romans themselves is characterized by its sensuality. Their paintings are sensational and brilliant. I first saw the garden room from the Villa Livia in 1981; it is a painting in blues and greens with dramatic accents in reds and yellows. The decorative schemes that line the walls of the Villa Poppaea at Oplontis are equally spectacular and astonishing, as are the frescoes at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. All these paintings show audacious and expressive use of saturated colour, daring compositional structures and spatial dynamics, as well as remarkable levels of technical skill and ingenuity. They were unknown until late in the nineteenth century, they had no direct influence on the history of painting, but they exerted their influence indirectly, via early Christian decorative schemes, and as lingering elements in Byzantine consciousness. Imagery of the Latin Poets however, such as Ovid’s in the Metamorphoses, had direct bearing on subsequent painting.
Greek, not Latin, was spoken at the Byzantine Court. Their visual arts were a synthetic expression of Greek Christian iconography. Elements from classical Greece were blended with Hellenistic, Roman Egyptian, late Roman and Middle Eastern decorative conventions, in order to create potent new symbolic forms. The Byzantines moved away from the idea that pictures can tell stories, moving closer to what is actually true: that pictures convey meaning experientially, instantaneously, in a more direct transmission and at a deeper level than thought. Their arts are focused on visions and on visionary experience. Byzantine paintings and mosaics invoke religious states, and this inward contemplation of spiritual reality looks back intuitively to the roots of painting in the cave. I have always been fascinated by the mosaics in Ravenna and I went to see them several times in the 1980s. I particularly remember walking to and from Classe, four or five kilometres from Ravenna, to see the famous Green mosaic at Sant’ Apollinare. That particular green is like a green standard in my imagination; neither blue nor yellow, neither cool nor warm. The startlingly intense effect of the Ravenna mosaics had a lasting impact on my work, as indeed it did on the development of painting itself.
Painters of the Gothic period developed an expressionism derived, most immediately, from conventions used in Byzantine mosaics. These include the use of stylised gestures and mournful expressions, wide open almond-shaped eyes, and the decorative representation of drapery folds which lack any intention to three dimensionality. The Early Gothic painters of Italy, working in the 1200s and 1300s, were called the “Primitives” even within my lifetime. Their paintings are dramatic and direct; their vein of expressive emotion runs through painting in the following centuries like an electric current. I think here of the Cimabue Crucifix from Santa Croce in Florence, a painting I studied closely in the 1980s after its restoration. I also think of many other paintings I loved in the 1980s, including Giotto’s decorations for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. This dazzling colouristic masterpiece is a study in the blues which were applied a secco to the top surface of his elaborate fresco prima.
Early Gothic painting was influenced by parallel developments in sculpture, especially, in Italy, by the stone carvings of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. Their sculptures evoke the late sculpture of ancient Rome, and they have the same “primitive” feeling as Cimabue. One of their greatest masterpieces is the pulpit which still stands in the dark wild spaces of the Gothic Romanesque cathedral in Siena. Another survivng masterpiece, the Maesta painted by Duccio, originally sat on the high altar there. With its sparklingly rendered textures, mournful and rapturous stylized gestures, and its transcendental colour schemes, this is the absolute masterpiece of Sienese Gothic painting, reflecting light into the darkness. Paintings of the Sienese school are the paintings of death and of night. Mystical, inward looking and symbolic, they reach back through the forms of Byzantium to evoke the artistic language used by the ancient Greeks, and beyond, and they invoke the deepest meditative states. Their paintings are distinct in every way from the rational Humanism of the Florentine Renaissance which overlaps the last late flowerings of Siena.
Gothic painting from Northern Europe, where sculptures were carved from timber, not stone, has a very different character again. Northern artists painted the daylight and returned to observation of Nature; in the 1400s their paintings started to fill with flowers, animals, landscapes and portraits. Of all these wonderfully fresh paintings, those of Dieric Bouts are outstanding for their painterly handling and their inner intensity. His painting of St John the Baptist in the Munich Alte Pinakothek is a particular favourite of mine, again due to its astonishingly beautiful saturated greens. Another painting in the same room of that museum has also influenced me greatly: Adriaen Isenbrandt’s Virgin with Female Saints. This is very late High Northern Gothic, painted in the first half of the sixteenth century, and it already bears the influence of the Italian Renaissance and of Leonardo. The painting shows purity of intention and expression; the arrangement and saturation of colours within is exceptionally refined and beautiful.
Beauty of colour (“bellezza di colore”) was of preeminent concern to Italian artists in the Quattrocento. Their carefully constructed formal paintings, in which beautiful colours are arranged systematically to avoid disruption of either pictorial or illusionistic space, were amongst the first pre-twentieth century paintings to influence my own. At this distance, they seem like studies for coloured abstractions. Many of these Renaissance paintings were an imaginative attempt to recreate what the paintings of classical antiquity might have looked like, but compositions were often based on Roman stone relief carvings, since almost no actual paintings from classical Greece or Rome could be seen at that time. As part of this same imperative to reconstruct Classical cultures, the Renaissance also witnessed a start to the collecting of Greco-Roman sculpture in Italy. The great collection of Cardinal Farnese, now in Naples, consists of Roman copies of lost Greek originals, reassembled from broken pieces in the Renaissance, then reworked again in the 17th and 18th centuries. What we see today is the collaborative outcome of an artistic conversation that played out across centuries. And yet, the bodily energy that the Greek artists first transmitted into their original works was strong enough to withstand all this. This collection of sculptures has taught me more about drawing, which is the art of transmitting bodily energy into painting, than anything else. The drawings of Raphael have also been profoundly helpful.
Investigations into both drawing and colour were taken further, and in new directions altogether, by the artists of sixteenth century Venice, especially by Titian, whose work is a high point of all painting. Unity of colour and tone is one of the distinguishing hallmarks of his painting, enabling him to become the first artist to master tonal realism. His unrivalled technical accomplishment, coupled to the wholeness of his pictorial conceptions, gave rise to colours which are amongst the most beautiful and varied in the whole of painting. At the same time, his paintings are characterised by their realisation of touch, weight and energy. This is direct transmission of sensual experience, even in the early work, but it eventually manifests as the sense that the artist is touching and stroking everything depicted. Energetic and descriptive handling of paint corresponds to the meaning of these representations, and gives rise, in the late paintings, to an all pervading spiritual light and atmosphere. One of these late works was the first of Titian’s paintings to call to me, early in the 1980s. The Death of Actaeon was something I saw regularly in London. I remember exactly the feeling that some terrible scene, beyond my understanding, was playing out in the darkness of this canvas, as the wind was blowing through the trees, and that everything was moving, at the periphery of my vision and consciousness, towards some foreboding doom.
The works of Michelangelo, another great Renaissance artist, are also extraordinary in every way, but really too tortured. Only at the end, in his last sculpture, in which he turns to violent Gothic expressionism, does Michelangelo find a beauty and a form commensurate to the terribilità of his gifts. This is the so-called Rondanini Pieta, which has always made me weep. It finds its counterpart in Titian’s own last work, again a Pieta. Once again the gestures and expressions are Gothic, but now we see them emerge from flickering half-lights. Titian bears witness to the sadness of death in an unimaginable depth of illusionistic space, which he created from multiple interleavings of opaque and transparent. These were applied directly with the artist’s fingers, in the manner of the earliest paintings. Beneath the glittering mosaic in the half-dome of the Byzantine setting, set beside crumbling Greco-Roman sculptures, and in the coldness of a vast stone sepulchre, Titian contemplates his own death, as well as that of God, whose dead body he touches with his hands. At the same time, the artist contemplates the history of Painting and Sculpture, which is about to draw to its end for him. At his own death, he takes painting back to the place of its birth, the darkness of the cave.
Baroque painting is largely a response to, and a hardening up of, Titian, though his greatest seventeenth century followers, Rubens and Velázquez, continued to develop some of his forms. It was not until the eighteenth century that a new fresh vein of painting was opened up, initially by Watteau, and subsequently by other great painters like Boucher, Mengs, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Goya. Their work is partly an attempt at taming the wild poetry of Watteau. I was unable to appreciate Rococo painting at all, when I was in my twenties, not knowing enough about either painting or myself. At some point in my thirties, Watteau’s Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère began to live in my imagination, as if some spell had been cast upon me. It’s his most famous painting, looking backwards to Venice and forwards to Monet. Cast in greens, blues, pinks, it’s all atmospheric clouds, and peopled with the dainty actresses and actors of the eighteenth century court. Nothing could appear to be further from the landscape, light and cultures of Australia in the 1990s that I was living in, but this painting of Watteau’s was my doorway into a different understanding of what painting really is.
Watteau’s paintings are like the symphonies of Mozart; they seem happy, witty and light-hearted, but actually they convey the deepest moods; Watteau’s moods are much sadder than Mozart’s. His paintings are more complex than they appear to be, but they retain a certain awkwardness which continually refreshens them. They are poetic, they depict life as if in a play, yet they have wonderful formal qualities. Watteau’s handling is an unending masterclass in the art of painting; his balance of transparents and opaques is unusually delicate and brilliant. The brushwork is soft but descriptive, allied masterfully to light. His pictures have a unity of colour and tone which very few artists, other than Titian, have surpassed. They do speak strongly to Titian, but also to the North, and out of this dichotomy he creates the basic language of eighteenth century French painting. It’s an inner world, quite the opposite of History Painting, and that’s the whole point: it’s antithetical to the Academy and to the rules of Academic painting. Watteau’s ways of painting may seem arbitrary, but his paintings have their own rules. They are representations of an elaborate fantasy, but one that points to the mystery and sadness of Being.
Watteau’s paintings were as highly appreciated at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, in Berlin, as they were in Paris. There is an extensive collection of paintings by Watteau in Berlin, including the second very different version of Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère which was painted for Charlottenburg Palace, where the painting is still hung today. As I have already suggested, Watteau’s influence on all subsequent painting was seminal, but the development of Rococo painting and decorative styles took a very different direction in the German States to the direction they had taken in France. Most importantly, Germanic forms of the Rococo retain connection to Gothic forms, which had long disappeared from French art. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change and innovation in the arts of German speaking Europe: Rococo, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Viennese Classical music, Wincklemann’s Art History, new streams of German philosophy, landscape painting, were all developed concurrently. They were divergent but related imperatives, they occurred and overlapped in differing ways in the work of different artists. The complex hybrid sensibilities of modern art date back to this eighteenth century flowering of forms.
The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen was born in 1770 and died in 1844. Although his work pays homage in every way to the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, the meaning of his sculptures is symbolic in a new way. His nudes are limpid. That is: their energy is invisible, not carried by dynamic movement of outward musculature, but present inside the art. The limpidity of his figures is the manifestation of a new kind of beauty. His sculptures are imbued with the deepest moods, but these are the moods of Art itself, rather than transcriptions from the moods of life, and Thorvaldsen is the first serious visual artist to abandon the pretense to storytelling altogether. This is what the work itself relays, irrespective of anything that the artist may have said. There is no external drama in his sculptures, in which the energy of the body itself is not transmitted at all. Instead, they convey a matchless spiritual intensity. All of this is new, the very beginning of nineteenth century Symbolist sensibility.
When I use the terms Symbolist, or Symbolism, I do not mean the traditional use of symbols, but a new expression of artistic consciousness: Symbolisme or Symbolizmus. That is: a new awareness that the work of art itself is a symbol, possessed of symbolic function. Symbolist artists did not work with “symbols”; indeed, they often tried to avoid conventional use of symbols altogether. Instead, they aspired to the creation of an artistic mood (stimmung), which they identified as symbolic experience. In this way, Symbolist artists took music as their model, and they placed a new emphasis on sensuality of form and on materiality. Nineteenth century Symbolism is usually left out of Art History altogether. If included at all, it is usually considered to be a French movement occurring briefly but loudly at the close of the Nineteenth century. I date the birth of Symbolism a hundred years earlier than this, I identify it with Germany and with Northern Europe, and I observe that it runs well into the twentieth century. Without this consideration, the origin and development of Abstract painting doesn’t make sense at all, and this is one of the reasons that Abstract painting is still so badly misunderstood.
In addition to Thorvaldsen, key artists in the arising of the new Symbolist consciousness were the German poet Hölderlin, Goethe in his last phase as the author of Faust Part II, and, later in the nineteenth century, the composer Richard Wagner. These four artists all went directly to ancient Greece for the basic forms of their art. Not only did Hölderlin translate Pindar’s Greek into German, but, more importantly, he modelled large sections of his own poetry on that of Pindar. This wasn’t just something cosmetic; the effect of reading Hölderlin is so similar to the effect of reading Pindar as to be quite disconcerting. Similarly, Goethe wrote his own versions of ancient Greek tragedies in German. In Faust Part II, he took the greatest pains imaginable to recreate the rhythms, musical effects, and the actual sounds of ancient Greek, into modern German. At one level, Faust Part II is very elaborate allegory of a traditional kind. Nevertheless, it stands in a new relationship to itself as a work of art, and its whole effect stands as a series of elaborate moods in tableau, distinguishing it as part of the new Symbolist intention.
Richard Wagner’s work took all nineteenth century concerns to new levels of artistic clarity, and this included a new realisation: that the rising tide of materialism was antithetical to the Work of Art. Wagner’s music dramas were his attempt to address this comprehension, and, at the same time, to recreate Athenian Tragedy using modern forms. The intensity of Wagner’s moods, previously unknown in art, opened up whole new channels of possibility for the artists who followed him. Some of the first to respond to Wagner were Baudelaire and the Symboliste poets of France, where a whole school of Symboliste painters, poets and musicians flourished, but schools of Symbolist painting were international. Symbolist paintings share their form with Wagner’s music dramas: both are staged tableau in which very little happens; everything occurs within, external drama is largely absent. Like Wagner, Symbolist painters, such as Hans von Marees, Ludwig von Hoffman, Ferdinand Hodler and Magnus Enckell, identified modern Human Beings with the ancient Greeks. In Symbolist paintings they were represented as nudes in the landscape, but Symbolist paintings also re-established the central importance of colour, materiality, surface and energy. These formal elements were to become the basis for Pure Abstraction in the twentieth century.
Numerous branches of Symbolism were mitigated through Modernism, including German Expressionism. German Expressionist palettes, such as those of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, are strident and visceral, but sophisticated and very beautiful. The other twentieth century expressionist who has influenced my work is not a colourist at all: Picasso, whose paintings link back to those of the Paleolithic cave. I have been more influenced by Picassos notebooks (which I saw in 1986 when they were first exhibited in London) than by any of his other work. I think of all the crazed animal sexual feeling that the artist evokes in his late drawings of Trojans. Picasso is a great painter, but I don’t take his “Modernism” seriously, most of all because Analytical Cubism can’t be taken seriously: it’s a fake painting and an imitation intellectualism, designed to shock, but also to flatter French intellectuals. Cubism, in any of its forms, is just a style, not an artistic movement. Any history of Art based on styles is pretty superficial, because style itself is pretty superficial.
Kandinsky, not Picasso, is the key Modernist painter. The two other artists who were central to the creation and development of Modernism were the poet Ezra Pound and the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who also painted, was a personal friend of Kandinsky, who also wrote poems. In addition to writing poetry, Ezra Pound also wrote music, including an Opera, and he worked for many years both as an art critic and as a music critic. I mention all this in order to make the following point: the history and complexity of human culture have determined that the serious artist must be highly trained in cultural forms. Kandinsky, Pound and Schoenberg were all knowledgeable, passionately so, regarding the history of poetry, painting and music, and they each created their own work out of their living relationship to the art of the past. They all felt the same thing: that the materialism of our culture is antithetical to the conditions necessary for the work of art itself to flourish. Therefore, they each set out in the creation of new forms, forms which they hoped would have the capacity to overcome the obstacles created by materialism and an economic system which destroys the imperatives of art.
Abstraction, the branch of painting which Kandinsky opened up, was developed out of everything described in the foregoing account, but it is something new. Abstract paintings are the expression of Painting itself; that is, the painting that arises from itself and is a vision of itself. It is a new manifestation of the ancient and original contract between Human Beings and Painting, and it is a new contingency. Abstract paintings do not express the ideas of the people who make, own, buy or sell them. Abstract painting, therefore, is the painting which cannot be co-opted into the values of the materialist economic system and way of life which are opposed in every way to the values of Painting.
Art is a communication across Time, but the communication is not with the artist who made the work, it is with the work of art itself. What could be less interesting or less important than the communication of one particular individual? Art is something altogether different to this.