Expressionism and Abstract Art

Inspired by the vibrant and not-necessarily-lifelike colors of Vincent van Gogh's paintings, Expressionists tended to exaggerate colors and lines for emotional effect.  Unlike Impressionists their goal was not to render subjects accurately but to express themselves emotively, and they used enhanced forms and intensified colors to do so.  They rejected the sanitized subject matter of much of classical and Impressionist art, depicting instead lifelike scenes of suffering, poverty, and angst.  In Germany, where, as E.H. Gombrich notes, the movement "found its most fertile soil," Expressionists tried to represent, among other things, the emotional and psychological effects of industrialization and urbanization.  

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913

All well and good.  Until somebody took it too far.

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born painter and theorist living in Germany at the turn of the century, thought he could express emotion with pure color—color abstracted from any recognizable form.  Gombrich states, "In his somewhat confused and passionate book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) [Kandinsky] stressed the psychological effects of pure color, the way a bright red can affect us like the call of a trumpet."  Thus began abstract art.

Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks, 1910

Here's what I think Kandinsky didn't understand:  While abstracted color can affect mood and please the eye, it cannot inspire the same depth of feeling as representational art because our associations with color per se are so varied and vague.  We've had countless encounters in our lives with red things—some good and some bad.  A painting must be more specific—i.e., it must be representational—to elicit a meaningful emotional response from the viewer.  Van Gogh's paintings convey so much emotion in part because they are paintings of things and people—a wheat field, a friend, a night sky, his mother, etc.  His use of vibrant color (among other things) helps us to experience his subjects the way he did, at least to some degree.  He could never have achieved the results he did if he had simply applied color—no matter how bright or rich—to the canvass with no recognizable forms.  

Regarding Kandinsky's early efforts at abstraction Gombrich writes, "One may doubt whether [his] first experiments at color music were a complete success . . . ."  One may indeed.  The shame of it is Kandinsky could really paint.  His early representational works are worth hanging.  Alas, he never (as far as I know) returned to representational painting.

The Sad State of Art Today

Last week The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting piece on the state of art today.  Here's the link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/remember-when-art-was-supposed-to-be-beautiful-1477090696

From Art to Non-Art in Three Easy Steps

Step 1 - Paul Cezanne

Cezanne wanted "to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums."  He often painted outdoors, and some of his works, especially from the 1870s, share the brilliant tones of Impressionist canvasses.  But as he matured artistically he wanted more than simply to record his observations of nature.  To his eye Impressionist works lacked something of the grandeur of seventeenth-century masterpieces (he particularly admired the art of Nicolas Poussin).  He wanted to reconcile the achievements of Impressionism with the beauty of classical masterworks—to unite the bright hues of Impressionist canvasses with the solid forms of traditional paintings, and to capture his experiences of nature without neglecting the harmony and depth of "the art in the museums."

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Bellevue, c. 1885

He experimented fearlessly—with color, perspective, geometric shapes.  Often working in seclusion in the south of France, he ignored convention and invented new techniques to achieve desired effects.  And on various levels, according to art mavens, he succeeded.  Shortly after his death in 1906, a Paris salon put on a major retrospective of his work.  It changed art history.

Step 2 - Cubism

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque attended the Cezanne retrospective.  Cezanne's art—particularly his use of geometric shapes and distorted perspective—fired their imaginations.  Together they began developing a radically new style of art.  They jettisoned single-point perspective, deconstructed (or "analyzed") objects into parts, and represented those parts on the canvass from multiple viewpoints and in discrete planes.  The result was a fractured, geometric aesthetic and the birth of Cubism. 

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

Other artists soon joined in the fun.  But unlike Picasso and Braque, who preferred making art to talking about it, many of the newcomers had a serious penchant for theory.  They were obsessed with grandiose ideas they couldn't understand, articulate, or relate to painting in any meaningful way (e.g., the so-called "fourth dimension").  But that didn't stop them from trying.  They held discussions, gave lectures, wrote papers, published books (1912's On Cubism was particularly influential).  And above all the theoretical white noise at least one idea, one claim, resonated:  in art ideas are more important than mere paint.  

Fifty years later this claim, this approach to art, would become a movement. 

Step 3 - Conceptual Art

According to The Tate, "conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. . . . Conceptual art can be—and look like—almost anything.  This is because, unlike a painter or sculptor who will think about how best they can express their idea using paint or sculptural materials and techniques, a conceptual artist uses whatever materials and whatever form is most appropriate to putting their idea across—this could be anything from a performance to a written description."  

Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974
(Beuys wrapped himself in felt and spent three days in a room with a coyote to protest the Vietnam War.)

The differences between Cubism and conceptual art parallel the differences between art and non-art.  Cubism (at least initially) was about the artist's idea of an object.  Conceptual art is about the artist's idea of anything.  Cubists took a new approach to the age-old challenge of representing three-dimensional objects on a flat surface.  Conceptual artists have no interest in representing objects.  Cubists rejected the canvass as a window.  Conceptual artists reject the canvass altogether.

If we accept conceptual art as real art—that is, if art can take any physical form (or no physical form) and can be about any conceivable idea—then we empty the terms "art" and "artist" of all meaning.  And if we do that, then to talk about art is to talk nonsense.