What's It All About, Alfie?: On Abstract Art and the Question of Meaning

Here are two paintings from the year 1824. The first is a "Seascape Study with Rain Clouds" by Constable:

This certainly could be an abstract work by a contemporary artist, hanging somewhere in Chelsea. The second is by Caspar David Friedrich, "The Sea of Ice":

Again, if I had not yet seen this, and someone told me that this painting was in a gallery in London, just completed by a young German artist, I would be impressed.  Both of these works are actually likely to have been studies: of light, of form, of the layering of paint. They contribute to each artist's practice, and yet neither is really characteristic of the major works of these men.  I find them moving. And yet, I have friends who belittle abstract art, who, when they are faced with a work by one of our contemporaries that seems as "abstract" as these, laugh, or think of them as "studies" for something more significant, as works with no meaning, as mere decoration. I have seen a sweet little old man point his umbrella towards the center of a huge De Kooning and say "There, there's the lighthouse. And the rock is just over here."


I remember an interview with Robert Motherwell on PBS, where he said, at one point, very slowly and forcefully, that "If the abstraction, the violence, the humanity was valid in Abstract Expressionism, then it cut out the ground from every other kind of painting."  And we look at a Motherwell, "Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV" from 1953-4, measuring 80 x 100" (think here of scale):

When you have been in a roomful of Motherwells,  it is impossible to deny their "violence" and "humanity." They are not decorative. They are meant to evoke feeling. I knew someone who worked for Motherwell once, who, fresh out of art school and trying to become a famous painter, asked his new teacher a series of questions. And Motherwell, a very articulate and learned person (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia), fed up, said, finally "Don't talk to me about theory.  *#%$  theory. Go home and astound me."  Abstract art may provoke theory, but it isn't made out of it.

It can be easy to walk right past a painting and not even try to take it in: it's too hard, it's too late in the day, it seems a silly exercise, people say. And yet, and yet. Take Mark Rothko.  Here is a work of his from 1954, called "Homage to Matisse" (who had just died that year):

Matisse is right there. Rothko said that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."  He meant, he said, to express "tragedy, ecstasy, doom ..." through his work.  Rothko's work does not reproduce well. It must be seen. He created it through transluscent layering, and, when you stand in front of one, you can see the colors peeking through, the way memories appear, unbidden. The paintings reverberate in real life. There is a DVD called "Rothko's Rooms" which is a pretty powerful introduction to his complexities as a person and to the aims of his art.  Kirk Varnedoe said that "Rothko may make us think anew about the evening sky, but having once thought about the evening sky, we think about Rothko differently."

Josef Albers created a series of works over years, working through the way that colors could show us the way to see.  Art and science were one, for him, and he worked through endless combinations of colors, sometimes with only faintly observable changes from one to the next, all in the same shapes, squares nested inside of squares.  Below is "Study for Homage to the Square" from 1970:

 

Even in digital reproduction, we can see something happening here.  As I thought through my list of abstract painters, I had no luck finding anyone who painted in the void. I can't think of anyone who didn't have recourse to feeling or meaning as the paintings developed. Not anyone. Albers may have said it best: "Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it."

And so I leave you with one last view, of a Northern California winter sky:

Artist's Statement IV: "...into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc.)..."

There are two kinds of artist's statements; the first presents the artist's general approach, developed over time (Cézanne's claim that "I don't think of anything when I paint") and then the artist's specific preoccupations of the moment (Constable's "I have done a good deal of skying -- for I am determined to conquer all difficulties").  At the moment, I am considering the specifics as I work on my odalisques.  And, in the main, I have a foreground/background (also known as figure/ground) question.

Richard Foreman gives me the place to start. He says he writes plays that he would like to see onstage, and he also has said that he does not want very much "story" in his work, because people fall asleep: "What this amounts to is a DECISION to view non-beautiful material in such a way that what was foreground is now background .... and the desired beauty is then projected, as the creative act, into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc. ..."  So we reverse figure and ground. And we do not fall asleep!

Here is the simplest foregrounded subject, a detail from "The Blue Crab," by Ferdinand Bauer, from approximately 1810:

We have nothing else to look at but the subject, the figure; the crab is laid out upon a totally white ground. It is a specimen. The background is irrelevant; in fact, there is nothing there, which is too bad, because if we replaced the crab in its context, the seashore's sands and rocks and seaweeds would be beautiful to see.

Francis Bacon believes in the figure and the foreground, and in pushing away the background almost entirely. Against the most passive and pale -- or un-identifiably bland -- backgrounds, his figures twist and turn, the faces are contorted, pained, unstable.  Look at this center panel from the triptych "Three Portraits," 1973, apparently a self-portrait:

Bacon worked from photographs that had sometimes already been mangled; the faces, and the bodies, were the thing for him, the only thing. I think he believed that the viewer might stand long enough before the painting to put the sitter's face back into some recognizable form, and that, in the process, we might see our confrontation with these distortions as the point.  He was a "foreground" man.

But, I really love Foreman's idea. Why can't we switch the foreground and background, and bring the viewer's gaze to a new place? I think that emotion can not always be seen in a person's face or demeanor, but instead we can sense it in the surrounding air, the sidewalks, the windowsill, the forest ... wherever the setting might be.  The figure -- the blue crab, or Bacon's self-portrait -- may not be the thing we should concentrate on.  Let's imagine, with Foreman, that it's the context that is important.

So here is an unlikely co-conspirator: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).  Friedrich's figures are inside the sublime. In this painting, called "The Wanderer above the Mists," the man, were we to cut him out and place him in the library of a club of his time in London, would be totally at home; he is impeccably dressed and unremarkable in himself. The man, the "figure" does not matter as much as the "ground," his context here; the painter has focused on the ice, the mist, the rocks, the mountains ... the "background" is here the foreground, the real subject:

The mountains in the distance are impossibly far and forbidding, as is the abyss before our lone figure.  The abyss matters. This is, of course, the forbidding Romantic idea of the Sublime, before which the poets and painters stood in awe. (See Wordsworth's "The Prelude" for more!). The place, the indifferent powerful world of Nature, the "ground," was the point, and not the "figure" standing before it.

Artists and their audiences "see" better when they pick up the figure's context and use it. I think that blank, open figures in a complicated space might allow us to project and imagine, particularly if we are looking at odalisques. The pale odalisque that Gerome painted in "The Moorish Bath" (my November 11 post) is in a context that matters... can we think our way inside?

So, "to illustrate my last remark," here is a detail of my painting "The River," a nude in a new context: