Images of Order

Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1964. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The following four paragraphs are from Lee Krasner: The Unacknowledged Equal (New York: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 2020), my book on Krasner’s part in the invention of the allover image—an innovation usually credited to Jackson Pollock alone. As far as I know, my thesis has not led to a sweeping revision of the historical record. The image of the autonomous creator, isolated in the ferment of his genius, is difficult to give up. And it has been difficult for art criticism to say much about the way an allover image works. Alloverness remains a puzzle, more than three-quarters of a century after it emerged. So I devoted much of The Unacknowledged Equal to an explication of Krasner and Pollock’s invention, and to contrasting it with the traditional composition they left behind with their first allover paintings.  Naturally, I discussed Piet Mondrian and other members of de Stijl: stylistic radicals devoted to pictorial structure at its most conservative.

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—from Lee Krasner: The Unacknowledged Equal

Composing with crisp lines and planes extracted from Cubist ambiguities, the painters of de Stijl meant their paintings to reveal the order of the universe: the harmony of “all things,” as Mondrian put it. His claim that the forms and colors in an “equilibriated composition” reveal the true, underlying nature of everything leads, in his utopian logic, to the further claim that pictorial equilibrium has the power to “signify what is just” in society. The utopia waiting in the wings of Mondrian’s aesthetic would have been rigidly hierarchical: boring, at best, and probably a nightmare of oppression. There was no chance that anyone would ever have to live under a de Stijl regime—the onset of the Second World War awoke modernism from its utopian dreams.

Piet Mondrian, Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Gray, 1926. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The hierarchies of imaginary societies are one thing; those of actual societies are another. In his Principles of Painting, 1708, the French academician Roger de Piles says “the objects, lines, colors, lights and shades” of a painter’s image must become “one poetical whole,” its wholeness enforced by “a general subordination, where the darks heighten the lights, and the lights set off the darks, and where the merit of each part is founded on a mutual dependence.” He compares this mutuality to the concord that unifies a peaceful nation, where “the great have need of the lower people, and these have need of the great.” Compositional harmony symbolizes social harmony, and yet a symbol does not always comport with fact and harsh regimes usually arrange for their stratifications to be mirrored—that is to say, flattered—by gorgeously composed canvases.

Las Meninas, 1656, by Diego Velázquez, shows a scene at the court of King Philip IV. Of the personages present, he and his Queen, Mariana, are the loftiest. The lowliest is a dog. In between are the royal couple’s daughter, the Infanta Maria Theresa, attendants of various ranks, and the artist, who gazes out at us, brush in hand. Velázquez enmeshes all these figures in a pattern of interlocking triangles. The flow of light and dark through this inexhaustibly subtle composition makes Las Meninas one of most entrancing paintings in the history of Western art. Of the thousands who view it every year, few note the disparity between the beauty of its formal structure and the cruelty of the social structure that placed Philip IV at its apex—and why should they? Though art encourages us to see it as a repository of the true and the real, we look to it even more intently for openings onto the unreal—the fictive, the speculative, the imaginary—and no one has offered the unreal in a more splendid guise than Hans Hofmann. Naturally, he called it “the real.” And he saw the artist’s life as the Search for the Real, the title of a book assembled, in 1967, from years of his lectures and writings.

Hans Hofmann, Cathedral, 1959. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

An extended exhortation masquerading as an instruction manual, Search for the Real declares that “the impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.” It would have been unfair to ask Hofmann exactly what breathes spiritual life into a composition. His purpose was not to lay out the stages of a practical process but to set students on the upward path to the domain of the ineffable, where “the physical aspects of a thing”—a well-composed painting—become “a self-sustaining spiritual reality.” Hans Hofmann’s “real” is a fiction in the form of a metaphysical absolute, an ideal of oneness to be apprehended not by reason but by willing intuition. And for all the realism of Las Meninas—for all the documentary evidence about the Spanish court it puts on such suave display—we love this painting for ushering us into a realm beyond the real.

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Utopia, “spiritual unity,” an idealized image of a seventeenth-century monarchy—such matters point us toward art’s larger meanings. But note this. Mondrian, Hofmann, and Velasquez lead us upward, from the ordinary world to more exalted realms. Yet I believe that art has a bearing on the everyday, joining with the rest of culture—everything from the movies to the design of interstate highways—to shape the meanings of our lives. I cannot, of course, prove this. Meaning, whether in art or in life, is not the upshot of logical analysis; it emerges from interpretations largely subconscious and forever subject to question, revision, and outright rejection. So I can offer no key to the down-to-earth significance of a work of art.  No such key is available. All I can do is attend to my experience of, say, a Mondrian and let the meanings that emerge drift beyond the boundaries of the strictly aesthetic.

Let us say, for example, that the balances and counterbalances of a Mondrian composition are not just extraordinarily refined resolutions of pictorial form, not just symbols of utopian perfection, but evidence of the artist’s sense of what the world is, in essence, and what it is to inhabit the world. These paintings evoke a quality of order the painter feels that he shares with all that is. Or so it seems to me. As I said, every interpretation is questionable. I never insist that I am right. Yet I do insist that we who engage with art have a responsibility to take our engagement as far as we can. The hope is that, reaching beyond the sorts of art-worldly things that art critics say, the discussion of art will give us a sense of what it is to be an individual and conscious of one’s individuality, immersed as it is in a social landscape.

Consciousness, of course, is busy, busy, busy. Among its innumerable tasks is to project itself into space, establishing and keeping track of up and down, near and far, left, and right. Mondrian’s compositions are impressive, in part, because they persuade us that the process of orienting ourselves in space can be utterly clear and completely resolved. By contrast, an allover painting—Lee Krasner’s Untitled, 1964, for example—has its impact by proposing that space is ambiguous, fluid. Order is local, not all-encompassing, so firm hierarchies never appear; every touch of color is at once central and peripheral. Hence an allover image has only a tenuous relationship with the edges of the canvas—and with itself.  It sweeps us into its contingencies. Fine, you might be saying, but what, after all, makes any of this more than a matter of aesthetic concern? That is a question for next week.