Now, until Aug.14, the featured works at the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art on Westmont campus, are all illustrative of “the diverse expressions and meanings of abstract art,” in an exhibition titled, Towards a 21st Century Abstraction.
The show means to inspire viewers to consider the future of abstract art, and ask questions such as: “Is abstraction dead? Is it die-able? Does abstract art need to be defended at this point, or simply re-averred? And in either case, by whom?”
The exhibition has been curated by art historian and cultural critic Peter Frank, and includes painters from around the country who are testing the limits of abstraction: David Bailin, Connie Connally, Brad Ellis, Jeri Ledbetter, Katherine Chang Liu, Sammy Peters, Doug Trump, and Wosene Worke Kosrof.
“This group formed in reaction, not to other art forms, but to the art world itself,” Frank said. “This is their attempt to re-valorize the ineffable in art … as abstraction is nothing if not the manifestation of the ineffable.” See Frank’s essay and a complete catalog of the exhibition at www.abstraction21c.com.
According to Judy Larson, R. Anthony Askew professor of art history and museum director, “Abstraction is likely the most challenging and often difficult style of art for museum visitors to understand. The eight artists in this exhibition range from creators of geometric abstraction to makers of compositions that incorporate signs and symbols; some work with collage while others work in a painterly drawing style.”
Connally being from Santa Barbara, and Chang Liu living and working in Westlake Village, Larson claims them as locals, “These two artists from our region of Southern California are making art that has achieved a national reputation.”
Abstract
At the outset of these remarks, I want to make plain that, in my opinion, most people — not those with a professional stake in the matter, but lay people with an abiding interest in art — when they use the word “abstract” to describe a work of art, generally just mean “non-representational.”
In “Less Than Words Can Say,” my hero, Richard Mitchell (The Underground Grammarian), wrote: “The power of language is so great that it can call things into existence simply through naming them.” This is something to bear in mind when we come to consider “abstract art.”
Writing about “[Henri] Bergson’s Theory of Art,” the English critic and poet, T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) observed that “The great difficulty in any talk about art lies in the extreme indefiniteness of the vocabulary you are obliged to employ. The concepts by which you endeavor to describe your attitude toward any work of art are so extraordinarily fluid.
“Words like creative, expressive, vital, rhythm, unity and personality [or, indeed, “abstraction” GC] are so vague that you can never be sure when you use them that you are conveying over at all the meaning you intended to. This is constantly realized unconsciously; in almost every decade a new catch word is invented which for a few years after its invention does convey, to a small set of people at any rate, a definite meaning, but even that very soon lapses into a fluid condition when it means anything and nothing.”
Anyway, as a nominalist, I resist talking about any artist as the member of a group or school. (“Nominalism,” according to the historian Owen Chadwick. is “the axiom that only the individual is real. Therefore it is impossible to frame syllogisms with a universal premise, since the `universal’ is only a collection of unique individuals. Hence a strong skepticism about merely logical conclusions, as opposed to conclusions derived from observation or experience.”)
Fortunately, the painters in the Westmont exhibition show no signs of towing any party line whatsoever, notwithstanding their sympathetic affiliations, but each goes blithely in his or her own way.
The first “movement” in American painting that had any impact worldwide — if we ignore the Hudson River School of Church, Moran and others — was the New York-based group of painters called Abstract Expressionists.
The group included the painters Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, and Peter Voulkos, but the Wikipedia entry on Abstract Expressionism lists 125 painters who were “significant artists whose mature work defined American abstract expressionism,” and another 94 who were “significant artists whose mature work relates to the American abstract expressionist movement.”
That’s a lot of painters who were allegedly on the same page, or perhaps I should say “canvas.”
Bear in mind the term did not come from any of the painters so-designated, but from the art critic Robert Coates who applied it to the New York artists in 1946. The term itself was coined in Germany (where else?) in 1919, and was first used to characterize the work of a specific artist (Wassily Kandinsky), in 1929. Many of the painters on the list have vehemently denied that their work was “abstract.”
My “American Heritage Dictionary“ lists five principal definitions of “abstract,” of which only the fifth has anything to do with art: “Designating a genre of painting whose intellectual and affective content depends solely on intrinsic form.”
This is fairly useful when considering the work of, say, Franz Kline, but irrelevant to the work of Clyfford Still or William de Kooning. Later, another art critic, the lawgiver Clement Greenberg, added the term “color field” to tighten up the critical framework.
This is possibly helpful if you studying to be an art critic, or are taking a course in art history, but if you are just an honest citizen strolling around a gallery, looking at the pictures, it is not very illuminating.
“… but perhaps,” wrote Hulme, in his essay “Modern Art and Its Philosophy:” “I can make it sound more plausible by saying how I came personally to believe it. You will have to excuse my putting it in autobiographical shape, for, after all, the break-up of a general attitude, if it ever occurs, will be a collection of autobiographies.”
Taking my cue from Hulme, as I often do, I want to put my experience of abstract art in what Hulme calls “autobiographical shape.” Until I was a senior in high school, I rarely thought about painting as an important element of my inner life. My mother was a painter, a competent but uninspired realist, who didn’t discover her true gift until she got into bronze casting.
The only painting of hers that I love is her one “abstraction,” which she painted in Avignon, using colors she mixed herself. Her artistic heroes were established classics like Michelangelo or Rembrandt. I acknowledged the greatness of their works without being engaged by them. They did not, as the Quaker George Fox would say, speak to my condition.
Then, in my senior year, I took a course called Design Lab. The teacher was a tall, slim, elegantly dressed man who spoke softly and seemed utterly detached from the class and his subject. Then, mid-semester, this teacher was involved in a contretemps with two 15-year-old boys, and was either fired or resigned in disgrace.
(He seems to have avoided jail, since I saw him a few weeks after his downfall, working in a shop that specialized in designer fabrics.)
His replacement was a short, scruffy New Yorker of Italian descent, who played Mahler symphonies during class and told us about some of the painters he had known, particularly Franz Kline. I forget the words he used — “tension”?; “imbalance”? — but following his finger as he traced the intersecting force lines in a Kline painting, I suddenly glimpsed a new world.
In class a few days later, I took a legal-sized piece of white poster board, dipped a brush into some dark purple paint, and slashed a half-dozen streaks crashing into each other on the white surface. The New Yorker, unbeknownst to me, was looking over my shoulder. “Franz Kline,” he said, “So, … you get it.”
I did not go on to become a painter, but if I had, I would have started out painting huge, stark, Kline-like canvases before I discovered my own way. That is the whole of my “theory” of art: you begin by imitating, as slavishly as possible, the artists — painters, sculptors, composers, novelists, poets — who you admire.
After a while, if you have the creative spark, alternate solutions, to the problems posed by the form and medium in which you have chosen to work, begin to occur to you. You try them out: if they work, you are on your way to finding your own vision, your own voice.
All art, when it is functioning properly, is some kind of dialogue. An artist who doesn’t want feedback is not an artist, but a wannabe priest. John Cheever once said the most important readers of his, or any writer’s, work were those few who were moved “to correspond with the author.”
Franz Kline had been dead, from rheumatic heart disease, several years before I painted my homage in Design Lab, but he was the one I was addressing.
The eight painters represented in the Westmont show are all worthy of our attention. They are in full command of their medium and, within the context of their own standards, technically faultless. Their differences are, of course, much more significant than their similarities.
Each, that is to say, has a unique vision. Some will catch your eye and hold it. Some will make you smile or raise your eyebrows. One or two will make you think about buying some paints: those are your ticket to another world.
Before coming to campus, guests must fill out a health questionnaire found at www.westmont.edu/visitor-information.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.