The Case for Abstraction | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

For much of human history, people made art by trying to represent the world as it appeared around them. Until about 100 years ago, when a bunch of artists stopped trying to do that. It was shocking then and it still upsets and confounds today. How are we supposed to deal with art completely removed from recognizable objects? And why should we? This is the case for Abstraction.

Hear our case for Minimalism: https://youtu.be/XEi0Ib-nNGo

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(ethereal music)

- [Narrator] For much of human history,

when people set out to make art

they did so by trying to represent things

as they appeared in the world around them.

And then about a hundred years ago,

a bunch of artists
stopped trying to do that.

It was shocking.

This is not what art
was supposed to be or do

and no one was given a compass really

for navigating this new art terrain,

for interpreting it, for appreciating it.

It's less shocking now, but
it still upsets and confounds.

How are we supposed to deal

with an art completely untethered

from the world of recognizable objects?

And more importantly, why should we?

This is the case for abstraction.

It's important to note

that we didn't just dive headlong

into complete abstraction in art.

JMW Turner's 'Seascapes,'
for example, demonstrate

that things that exist in the
world can often look abstract.

James McNeill Whistler's
'Nocturne' turns show this too

as do Victor Hugo's 'Ink Drawings.'

But as the 19th century unfolded,

with the Industrial Revolution

and the invention of
photography, life in European

and American cities changed
dramatically, and it should come

as no surprise that representations
of that life change too.

Artists were increasingly interested

in depicting things
non-naturalistically, setting

about abstracting things,

i.e. starting with worldly subject matter

but stylizing it, simplifying
it, flattening it.

By the 20th century, Matisse
and Andre Derain were painting

familiar things, but in unfamiliar ways,

using such intense colors
and broad brush strokes

that a critic dubbed them
the Fauves or wild beasts.

Picasso and George Brock
pioneered the cubist style,

painting much of the
usual still life fodder,

but breaking it up into geometric shapes,

fragmenting the picture plane

and showing multiple
sides of a thing at once.

Cubism simultaneously revealed more

than what the eye could see,
fussing multiple perspectives

and moments in time while
also drawing attention

to the flatness of the canvas itself.

The Italian futurists
wanted to reflect the speed

and overstimulation of modern urban life,

also collapsing space
and time into one image.

German expressionist,
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, used

abstraction and rich, unreal
colors to depict the chaos

and anxiety of the city street.

His contemporaries, Franz Marc

and Wassilly Kandinsky,
cited influences as diverse

as tribal art from Africa,
medieval German woodcuts,

Russian folk art, art
nouveau and art by children.

But while Marc pursued
abstraction to connect

with the natural world,

Kandinsky's interest was to
commune with the spiritual.

He claimed his art was
"what the spectator lives

or feels while under the
effect of the form and color

combinations of the picture."

For Kandinsky abstraction
was not opposed to realism,

it was realism.

I mean, there are real things
that can't be seen after all.

Emotion and consciousness are realities

and maybe they could be painted too.

Kazimir Malevich called
his brand of abstraction.

Suprematism, saying his
geometric elements alone and

in arrangements constituted
the zero of form,

beyond which laid the "supremacy
of pure artistic feeling."

In the years leading up to World War I

all these groups with names
give the false impression

that what was happening
was cohesive or organized.

It wasn't.

Abstraction did emerge through
an international network

of artists who followed
what each other were doing.

But then again, we now know

that Swedish painter, Hilma
Af Klimt, was painting

mostly abstract works as early as 1905.

She was part

of a group called The
Five who conducted seances

to communicate with
spirits through pictures.

Klimt's abstractions
came from this interest

in the spiritual and
occult as well as science

and the depiction of invisible forces

like recently-discovered
electromagnetic fields,

X-rays and infrared light.

Theosophists, Annie Besant
and Charles Leadbeater

had published images in 1901
they called thought forms,

illustrating their belief

that ideas, emotions and sounds
manifest as visual auras.

Kandinsky, and many others
read this work and also saw

in music an important parallel,
an art form considered

on its own terms and freed

from the burden of representing
things in the world.

Kandinsky liked Wagner and Schonberg.

Paul Klee loved Bach.

Frantisek Kupka also
drew a strong connection

between music and painting, believing

that without the distraction
of subject matter

art could act directly on the soul.

But Robert Delauney was
horrified by music and noise

and said, "I never speak of mathematics

and never bother with spirit."

He was more concerned with the immediacy

and pictorial realities
of color and contrast

and his "First Disc" was
considered the purest abstraction

at the time.

His wife, Sonia Delauney,
illustrated an influential book

of poetry combining
abstraction and typography,

a style she extended into
painting and later into fashion.

Piet Mondrian found his
own way to abstraction

translating his favorite subjects

like trees and architecture
into gridded arrangements.

Spatial illusion is replaced

by what Mondrian termed truth.

For him, everything could
be processed into horizontal

and vertical lines,
revealing the structure

of the world through binary oppositions.

So abstraction was never monolithic.

In the traumatic years of World War I,

artists like Paul Klee can be seen

as consciously turning away
from the material world.

Serving in the German army,

Klee wrote in 1915, "the more
horrifying this world becomes,

the more art becomes abstract."

After the war, Klee and a number
of abstract artists taught

at the Bauhaus School, founded
in 1919 in Weimar, Germany.

It was organized around the principle

that the crafts were on
equal footing with art

and they sought to elevate the quality

of life through architecture
and objects as well as art.

This focus on function as
well as form, was also adopted

by Theo Van Doesberg and members

of the Dutch De Stijl group.

Theirs was, "a new plastic art,

a simplified geometric
style that could serve

as a universal aesthetic
language for everyday life."

Abstraction also found its way
forward through explorations

of chance with data artists
like Hans Arp collaging squares

he dropped arbitrarily onto paper.

It wasn't all just painting
and drawing either.

Abstract sculpture took
hold, for instance,

in Russia, with the
work of Vladimir Tatlin

and his professed truth to
materials before the war

and Alexander Rodchenko after it.

Rodchenko exhibited three
monochromatic paintings

in 1921, after which he
wrote, "It's all over.

There is to be no more representation."

He then denounced painting
and fine art altogether

and with the Productivists
aimed to integrate art into life

focusing on the design of posters and ads.

But of course, the enterprise

of abstract painting would
continue to go on and on and on

and all with different motivations.

There was El Lissitzky,
Marsden Hartley, Joan Miro,

Alexander Calder, Arshile
Gorky, and many others

in many parts of the world.

During World War II,

many European artists fled
to the US and worked there

including Joseph and Anni
Albers, Fernand Leger, Mondrian

Jacques Lipschitz, Hans Hoffman,
Andre Masson, and Max Ernst

bringing new approaches
to abstraction with them.

That influx of avant-garde
thinking is considered

to be an important precondition

for the success of the
abstract expressionists

in New York in the 1940s and fifties.

Many of those guys looked to ancient myths

in archaic cultures in search
for timeless subject matter

and were influenced by Jungian
psychology as well as jazz.

This largely improvisational
approach imparted a kind

of directness

and immediacy meant to provoke
strong emotional responses

through large scale and
either dynamic gesture

or expansive fields of color.

The Gutai group in Japan
also embraced the canvas

as an arena for action, Kazuo Shiraga

even painting with his feet.

There was post painterly abstraction

with Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis

and hard edge abstract painting,

which can be used to describe
the work of Ellsworth Kelly,

Kenneth Noland, Felrath
Hines, Agnes Martin,

and Ad Reinhardt.

There was op art and of course minimalism,

which seemed to boil art down
to its most basic materials.

And then post minimalism,

which emphasized unconventional materials

in the physical process of making.

There was neo-expressionism in the 1980s,

conceptual abstraction in the nineties.

We're skipping over scads of important

and interesting work here.

But as we hurdle toward the present,

it becomes clear that
abstraction has been deployed

by a wide range of artists
toward innumerable ends.

Abstraction is no longer
an iconoclastic choice

but it has nonetheless proved itself to be

a productive field for those
who commit themselves to it.

The most compelling abstract
work being made today

often builds upon the
traditions of the medium,

recycling and reinterpreting
prior approaches

toward the creation of something new.

Abstraction can be used
to think about technology,

its forms and functions, and
also the denial of technology

through an emphasis on
tactility and physical presence.

It also continues to
ask us what is the right

and wrong way to make art?

In what ways can we still
intrigue the eye and mind?

There's a fair bit

of grumbling today about
how the current and inflated

art market unfairly
privileges abstract painting.

But there's something
important at play in that fact.

Much can be contained in abstraction.

It's not just one thing.

It can be a mirror or a window,
and it can shift depending

on who is looking at
it and where and when.

It is done well, and it is done poorly,

but the flexibility that makes it open

to interpretation also
makes it market-friendly

and international.

When it's good, it rewards
longer stints of looking.

It changes as you change,

but that expansiveness can
also be frustrating, too wide.

But if we zoom out, we can see

that many of the core ways we have

of interacting with
the world are abstract.

Religion, markets, currency,

and humans have always liked abstractions.

We see abstract patterns way
early on in cave carvings

and as marks on pottery and textiles.

Geometric marks and forms
have been with us all along,

often dismissed as decoration or relegated

to the world of craft.

This whole narrative is a farce

if we consider how long
abstraction has been with us,

that it was not invented, so
much as discovered or accepted.

When looked at a different way,

what's strange may be the period

when humans did not embrace abstraction.