The Politics of Abstract Painting

Piet Mondrian in his New York Studio, early 1940s

To pick up where we left off last week: what about the idea that abstract painting is inherently progressive, that it aligns itself with those who work for equality, democracy, and the common good? Even now, when so much abstract painting presents itself as little more than attractive decoration, this idea lingers, sustaining the notion that abstraction is somehow more serious than figuration.

The Museum of Modern Art was founded, in 1929, with a high purpose: to provide America with a coherent vision of advanced painting and sculpture. The visionary in charge was Alfred J. Barr, the museum’s first director and a historian whose account of the avant-garde has never suffered any substantial modification. With Cubism and Abstract Art, an immense exhibition mounted in 1936, Barr mapped the stylistic currents that led to the moment’s most radical work. Partway through his introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue he makes this observation: at the outset of twentieth century, “the pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed and refined many times and in different ways during the previous half millennium. The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts.” Representation was dull, abstraction was exciting; moreover, the logic of art history required it. Artists took a larger view. The need for abstraction, they believed, arose from the lamentable state of society.

When the Russian Revolution began, in 1917, Moscow was the easternmost outpost of the European avant-garde. Cubists, Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Constructivists, and Suprematists jostled one another in the rush to the future. A 1919 manifesto by Suprematism’s founder, Kasmir Malevich, dismissed representational painting as merely “utilitarian.” Rather than picture things, the painter should employ the “pure color” that opens the way to the infinite and freedom. A year later, he praised radical painters and sculptors collaborating with “the avant-gardes of politics and economics” to redefine not only art but life. “Creativity,” he said, “is the essence of man.” As innovation reveals this essence, society will advance toward “Revolutionary Perfection.” (“The Question of Imitative Art,” 1920)

Piet Mondrian and other Dutch avant-gardists gathered under the banner of de Stijl made equally optimistic claims for abstraction—and devised new jargon to underscore the newness of their art. What generations of writers had called a harmonious composition Mondrian called an “equilibriated composition.” Pictorial harmony, he claimed, will lead to social harmony, for “art and life are one” and “equilibriated relationships in society signify what is just.” (“A Dialogue on Neoplasticism,” 1919) Mondrian did not explain how signifying justice in an abstract painting would establish justice in the ordinary world. The prophesies of utopian modernism relied on faith, not evidence. In Western Europe and the United States, that faith perished amid the horrors of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The end came suddenly in the Soviet Union, when, in 1934, Stalin’s regime proclaimed Socialist Realism the only acceptable style of art. Henceforth, the Soviet public saw no avant-garde abstraction, only drearily academic representations of a worker’s paradise that had not yet arrived and of course never did.

Yet it’s not quite right to say that utopian optimism collapsed completely under the onslaught of mid-twentieth-century disaster. In 1961 Barnett Newman was asked, “Can you clarify the meaning of your work in relation to society?” He said:

It is full of meaning, but the meaning must come from the seeing, not from the talking. I feel, however, that one of its implications is the assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life. Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what my paintings might possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.

Newman first made this reply in 1949. The year before, he declared that he and his colleagues were making art “out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” From inward feelings comes art and from art—specifically, abstract art—comes a lethal challenge to “state capitalism and totalitarianism.” But how, exactly, would abstraction defeat these baleful forces? Newman did not answer this question, any more than Mondrian did.

At this point, you might be saying, all right, decades ago certain abstract artists and their supporters believed that abstract painting is, by virtue of its abstractness, a force for the good. But that belief faded, so why am I talking about it? Because, as I said at the outset, faith in abstraction’s power lingers, however faintly. No one promises that abstract painting will lead us to utopia, but there is a quiet, mostly subliminal belief that at least some of it is somehow revelatory—that it gets at the underlying order of the universe or the essence of the artist who produced it. Nothing makes this belief imperative. We are free to see an abstract painting as empty or merely decorative or even oppressive.

Barnett Newman in his studio, 1965

If you think the last of these possibilities is fanciful, remember that Newman saw in Mondrian’s paintings a tyrannical, Old-World authority it was his mission to overthrow. Talking with his friend Thomas B. Hess toward the end of the 1960s, Newman boasted that he had “busted geometry.” A clue to what this might mean appeared earlier in the decade, when he said, “I’ve licked Mondrian; I’ve killed the diagram.” As Newman saw it, his geometry liberated vision by opening the image to the space beyond the frame. By enclosing the image within the frame, Mondrian’s geometry induced claustrophobia in Newman and in Clyfford Still, his contemporary.

Still’s need for freedom was so desperate that he could not abide the simple fact that a canvas has edges. “To be stopped by a frame’s edge was intolerable,” he said in 1963. Of course, his paintings are confined by their edges, a certainty he evaded on the plane of the imagination by charging his images with pictorial forces that seem to reach beyond the canvas. The European avant-garde enraged him by filling the world with paintings that, as he saw them, merely reiterate the frame—paintings like Piet Mondrian’s, though Still rarely did Mondrian the honor of indicting him by name. Painters who accepted the frame’s limits were enemies of the self’s potential boundlessness. Looking past geometric abstraction to geometry’s origins, Still saw an ancient despotism of straight edge and right angle. There is “a Euclidean prison . . . to be annihilated,” he said. To escape that prison, the painter must challenge the “authoritarian” frame with imagery indifferent to boundaries. Painters who shy away from this challenge are weaklings “hopelessly trapped in the grids and geometries laid down by the saint of all masochists, Euclid.” Thus Mondrian’s paintings are evidence of his masochism.

This impresses me as an odd, not to say demented, view of a widely admired painter, and yet I cannot say Still is wrong. Or right. A logical argument or a mathematical equation is right or wrong, not for me or you or Clyfford Still but for everyone. A meaning, by contrast, is neither right nor wrong. Whatever it is—useful, enthralling, banal, silly, ambiguous—it is that for you, specifically, and takes its character from you. For you invent it as you respond in your inevitably individual way to a work of art or anything else you might encounter. The moral of the story: no meaning takes up permanent residence in a certain kind of painting. Abstraction is by nature neither the realization of the medium’s utopian yearning nor a pointless detour. It has no general meaning and that gives you a responsibility to create for yourself the meanings of specific paintings. To paraphrase Frank Stella, the ball is always on your side of the net.