Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
From www.artforum.com - September 10, 3:15 PM

In Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today (Magütt Publishing, 2024), a volume of essays edited by Alessandro Ferraro, a range of authors—including artist Peter Halley, critic Francesca Gavin, and Artforum.com senior editor Travis Jeppesen—examine the past, present, and future of abstract art.

On abstraction and its enduring legacies
September 10, 2024 3:15 pm
Xiyao Wang, River, River, Could You Tell Me the Story of My Hometown No.1, 2022, acrylic, oil stick on canvas, 129 7/8 × 267 3/4''. Photo: Claire Dorn.
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In Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today (Magütt Publishing, 2024), a volume of essays edited by Alessandro Ferraro, a range of authors—including artist Peter Halley, critic Francesca Gavin, and Artforum.com senior editor Travis Jeppesen—examine the past, present, and future of abstract art. In this exclusive excerpt, art historian Isabel Wünsche frames the emergence of two emerging voices in contemporary abstraction, Tarini Ahuja and Xiyao Wang, against the Eurocentric approach that previously predominated in historical discourse surrounding nonrepresentational painting.

 

 

ABSTRACTION AS A FORMAL APPROACH in the visual arts has provoked, perplexed, and inspired us now for more than one hundred years, and for almost as long, art historians have been offering interpretations and perspectives on its development and application. Historically, the emergence of abstract art has been linked to Romanticism and Impressionism as well as Jugendstil and Art Nouveau design. Theorists as well as practitioners have invested considerable time and effort in devising complex strategies intended to ratify its existence as a legitimate art form, in general, and, in particular, as one endowed with expressive powers and capable of evoking alternative levels of reality and consciousness. In recent years, however, the search for general principles has been more or less abandoned. Instead, the emphasis has been on the historical contexts within which abstract art is produced. In the twenty-first century, the engagement with new digital media and the application of digital visualization practices has sparked new investigations into the forms and functions of abstraction and the interpretation of abstract patterns.

 

A Universal Visual World Language: Abstract Art in the West

By the 1930s, abstraction as an artistic idiom had already acquired several influential promoters in the United States. Alfred H. Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was drawn to abstraction “for its insistence on the absolute,” its purity of style, originality of invention, and the influence of the artist within an international matrix. In the catalogue for the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr charted the gradual evolution towards abstraction. He traced the development of modernist art chronologically, nationally, and stylistically from the 1890s to the present, indicating an inevitable teleological progression towards abstraction and distinguishing between geometrical and non-geometrical abstract art, thereby playing out the opposition between intellect and intuition, technology and nature, the geometric and the organic. With his systematic approach, which relieved formal analysis of any interpretative responsibility, Barr strongly influenced art history writing and art criticism well into the 1960s, not only paving the way for Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory of modern art, but also for the ideological role of abstract art in the cultural battles of the Cold War. Hilla Rebay, another early American proponent of abstract art and founding director of the Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, celebrated abstraction in her 1938 essay The Value of Non-Objectivity:

The non-objective picture stands by itself as an entirely free creation, conceived out of the intuitive enjoyment of space. It is the visual essence of rhythmic balance in form, design, and color. […] The non-objective picture is far superior to all others in its influential potentiality, educational power, and spiritual value to humanity.

Through the efforts of critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, art collectors and educators, among them Katherine S. Dreier and Hilla Rebay, and art historians, including Alfred H. Barr in the United States, Michel Tapié in France, and Werner Haftmann in Germany, abstract art began to gain mainstream acceptance in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Arnold Gehlen saw the expression of true freedom only in abstract painting, which, according to Werner Haftmann, in his 1954 book Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (Painting of the Twentieth Century), had taken on a “global character” and established itself as universal art form.

This notion of abstract art as universal in nature found one of its most pronounced expressions in the 1958 publication Abstrakte Kunst – Eine Weltsprache (Abstract Art – A World Language) by Georg Poensgen and Leopold Zahn, who compared it to “that great revolution called the Renaissance:”

The development of modern art towards the abstract and universal, eliminating the external and the individual, has made possible, through a common effort and common vision, the realization of a collective style that, rising above the person and nation, in a very definite and real way, the highest, deepest, and most comprehensive claims of beauty.

Poensgen and Zahn celebrated the “new forms and form systems, these new color tones and signs that belong to the global signature of our century” and highlighted the development of abstraction in painting and sculpture from its precursors in the late work of William Turner, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Tachisme, Art Informel, and Abstract Expressionism. Their introduction is followed by brief biographies of 269 artists (including ten female artists), from Max Ackermann to Ossip Zadkine, supplemented by a chronological and geographical overview. A critical examination of the artists, movements, and their geographical distribution, however, is revealing; as it would appear that abstract art is in fact an exclusively western phenomenon.

 
 

 

The presumed role of abstract art as a universal visual language was founded upon various anthropological, psychological, and aesthetic considerations. Barr, in his 1936 chart, had identified “Japanese prints,” “Near-Eastern art,” and “Negro sculpture” as sources of inspiration in the development towards abstraction. Willi Baumeister, in his influential book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art, 1947), postulates a parallel between the creative processes in nature and the process of artistic creation and maintains that the abstract artist, using elements from archaic and non-western cultures, is drawing on a universal cultural heritage. The Abstract Expressionists, who held that the authenticity of a work of art lay in its directness and immediacy of expression, often turned to ancient myth and archaic cultures for inspiration (as well as Jungian psychology). By allowing, even encouraging, the artist to draw inspiration from the diverse repertoire of other cultures and past epochs, from cave painting to calligraphy, abstractionists insisted upon a universal art-historical context. This was at a time when such thinking was governed by the unwavering belief that the world was moving inevitably forward with respect to the advancement of democracy, scientific-technical progress, and secularization, and abstract painting was the appropriate artistic expression of these modern realities. Writers such as Barr, Greenberg, Haftmann, Poensgen, and Zahn appropriated abstract art to posit the artistic and cultural superiority of the western world. By emphasizing the universal character of abstraction as a form of artistic expression, they implied that abstraction would soon become the dominant art form throughout the world, as it was an expression of modernity and progress. After the Second World War, abstract art proved crucial to narratives positing postwar American modernism as the heir to earlier Twentieth-century European modernism, thus serving to ratify American artistic and cultural hegemony.

 

 

Towards Individual Expression: Abstraction Outside the Western World

Abstraction, however, not only shaped European and American modernism in the Twentieth Century, it also left its mark in Latin America, the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Thus, its narrative as a purely western phenomenon requires a closer examination.

A largely Eurocentric approach results in a distorted value system in which some works are more authentic than others. Such thinking, with respect to western primacy in artistic creation further enhances notions of primary vs. secondary, influencing vs. influenced, center-periphery and other “western vs. the others” dichotomies in modernist and avant-garde art.

The emergence of modernist art in the West was the result of efforts to come to terms with the rapid new developments in urban, industrial, and secular life during the Nineteenth Century. Artistic production in countries such as China and India was largely untouched by the paradigms of first one- and then multi-point perspective and the illusion of three-dimensionality that arose in the Renaissance. Instead, an awareness of the formal and expressive possibilities of the media and techniques in use had been a commonplace understanding for Chinese ink painters and Indian miniature painters over many centuries. Thus, the radicalism of the European and American avant-garde was alien to artists in the East. This becomes evident when one looks, for example, at artistic production of modernist art scenes in Bombay, India and Shanghai, China.

In India, European modernism was a distinctive influence on the Progressive Artists’ Group, founded by young artists based in Bombay, among them Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza, and Maqbool Fida Husain, in 1947, the year in which India gained independence. The members of the group rejected the colonial academic style and the nationalist art of the Bengal School and embraced instead international modernist art practices. They pursued various new styles, ranging from Expressionism to pure abstraction and the depiction of traditional Indian art elements and media. Balancing international modernism and an indigenous nationalism, the members of the group strove to create a new equation between “modern” and “Indian” in line with India’s modern, secular vision and became one of the most influential art movements in India.

One of the painters associated with the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay and today one of the most prominent representatives of abstraction in modern Indian art is Vasudei Santu Gaitonde (1924–2001). He studied at the Sir Jamsethji Jijibhai School of Art in Bombay, where he was introduced to Indian mural painting and miniature painting as well as European modernism, including the works of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Gaitonde experimented widely, using various techniques, including oil painting, watercolor, and mixed media and began to create his own non-representational works in the 1950s. Building upon his engagement with Zen Buddhism and ancient calligraphy, he used a layering process to create atmospheric works, whose surfaces he enriched with spontaneous calligraphic textures. His paintings are meditations on color, form, texture in which he considered Indian aesthetic theory, maintaining that a complete artistic experience requires the viewer to be both a rasika (one who experiences intuitively) and a rasajna (one who learns analytically). Thus, he was able to create a unique identity for himself and, with his cosmopolitan worldview and approach to abstraction, he inspired young artists to experiment with this art form.

In early Twentieth-century China, artists were likewise attracted by the diversity of European styles they encountered, from academic realism to expressionism. Abstraction, however, was poorly received, a situation that only gradually changed with the introduction of the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists, which among many artists resonated with the traditional language of Chinese ink painting. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) was one of several artists in China desiring to move beyond the long tradition of Chinese landscape painting. He began to draw inspiration from western abstract art in order to create works that would capture the “essence” of the form. By marrying eastern tradition with western influences, he eventually found his own path to abstraction. Wu Guanzhong had studied both Chinese and western painting at Hangzhou National Academy of Art from 1936 to 1942. In 1947, he received a government scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he took a great interest in modern French art, particularly Post-Impressionism, and also familiarized himself with the principles of aesthetic formalism. After his return to China, he introduced aspects of western art to his students at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, where he taught from 1950 to 1953 (at the time, the academy was dominated by socialist realism). His life and career were dramatically interrupted by the Chinese Cultural Revolution; only after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, he was able to return to painting and his formalist approach to art. Focusing on formal beauty in the arrangement of color and form, he strove to use eastern rhythms in conjunction with a western approach to painting, combining oil painting and ink drawing—with the goal of “nationaliz[ing] oil painting and moderniz[ing] Chinese painting,” which in his view were “two sides of the same face.”

In the 1980s, artists in Shanghai searching for an individual artistic language were drawn to abstraction, which offered a means of opposition to mainstream art. Many of the Shanghai artists worked with mixed media, combining oil on canvas and ink on rice paper. Using pictorial elements such as lines, dots, and shapes, their abstract works offered multiple layers of interpretation and could be understood in either an eastern or a western historical and philosophical context. The artists greatly influenced younger artists emerging in the mid-to late 1980s who went on to form the ‘85 New Wave Movement. By the late 1980s, abstract art practices in China had become a growing search for a “purified language,” representing both the initial resistance to mainstream art and the general transformation process of the society.

Between Cultural Tradition and Artistic Innovation: Contemporary Abstract Voices

The cross-cultural dialogue in abstraction today is perhaps captured best in the work of non-western artists positioned between their own cultural traditions and their intensive studies of western art practices. In conclusion, I want to look at the work of two emerging voices in contemporary abstraction, Tarini Ahuja and Xiyao Wang, born and educated in India and China respectively. Each is exhibiting internationally, thus they are a part of the global art world of the 21st Century. Tarini Ahuja’s development as a painter was shaped by the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group of Mumbai, but also by the painterly approaches of western abstract artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly.

Born in New Delhi in 1990, she pursued her undergraduate studies at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore and then continued her artistic training at Goldsmith’s, University of London, where she graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts in 2013. Abstraction, she has indicated, offers her a way to capture in her paintings the ephemeral, fleeting moments of everyday life. Her approach is informed by Eastern philosophy, above all the Japanese concept of mono no aware—an awareness of the impermanence of things and the powerful emotions this notion generates with our awareness of the transient lives we lead, and the memorable moments contained in them.

In her first solo exhibition at the India International Centre in New Delhi in 2015, she explored the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, a world view and aesthetic approach that centers on an acceptance of nature’s fragility, transience, and imperfection. Thus, the beauty of wabi-sabi lies in its ambiguity; it is a way to find beauty and harmony in what is simple, modest, and mysterious. In her most recent, second solo exhibition in New Delhi, she explored the musical notion of adagio, a tempo marking indicating a passage to be played slowly, leisurely, and gracefully. Adagio as a creative principle enables her to slow down the artistic process and reflect upon her approach of working with her hands, making marks that are luscious and intuitive.

Ahuja’s focus is on the creative process; the act of painting is a deep exploration of the mesmeric language of abstraction. She generally begins with an elaborate outline of color schemes and compositions, which allows her to explore various scenarios and formal problems. She builds structures and simultaneously obliterates them, intuitively layering paint. In this process, color is a crucial element in her work and an ever-evolving source of inspiration. She spends days creating elaborate palettes and mapping out color tones to capture in her dreamlike polychromatic works the fleeting moments of everyday experiences. Ahuja paints with complete sense of awareness and constant reflection. She enjoys the tactile nature of painting and the paradox of an approach where impulse and control, calm and chaos, go hand in hand. Acknowledging a direct link between slowness and memory, she explores in her paintings ideas such as stillness, impermanence, and restraint, which she captures with sensuous lines and intuitive marks. Furthermore, she sees abstract painting as an alternative approach to dealing with the intense medial realities of the digital age. Abstract painting offers an alternative, a way to slow things down and invite us to reflect on the physical presence.

For Xiyao Wang, abstract painting is also the most adequate and direct form of expression; it is movement captured onto large canvases, expressing a feeling of boundlessness and joie de vivre. Born into an artist’s family in Chongqing, China, in 1992, Xiyao Wang pursued dance, poetry, and the visual arts from an early age. From 2010 to 2014, she studied printmaking at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where she received classical art training including a wide variety of technical skills as well as an introduction to Chinese and western art history. Her first encounter with western modernism was a catalogue of works by Paul Klee which she received as renumeration for one of her prints in 2013. Her subsequent encounter with Neo-Expressionism provided her with an artistic approach that would enable her to transfer her own feelings and thoughts onto the canvas. In 2014, she moved to Germany, where she continued her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg under Werner Büttner, one of the protagonists of Neo-Expressionism, and Thilo Heinzmann, and also studied in performance artist Jochen Dehn’s class. A recipient of a Karl H. Ditze Foundation and DAAD PROMOS scholarship in 2018, she continued her studies in the MFA program at the State University of New York at Purchase, using her study trip to intensively engage with Abstract Expressionism, which became a major influence upon her own development as a painter. She completed her studies in painting under Anselm Reyle in Hamburg, receiving her MFA in 2020, and currently lives in Berlin.

Here, too, the artist’s main concern is with the creative process: for Xiyao Wang this usually originates from a point of intense inspiration, triggered either by external impressions or by her own thoughts and feelings. The inspiration defines her choice of artistic means and leads directly to her exploration of color, line, and form. Immersing herself in the creative process on the large-scale canvas in front of her, she feels free from all constraint and lets the lines develop and weave together as if in a constant state of flow, transformation, and flight. She has described her artistic work as a nearly bodiless process, as if her soul were suspended in the air. Her works arise from the dialogue between the expressive gestures of her body as she paints, and the resulting marks generated on the large canvases.

Xiyao Wang combines various techniques such as oil and acrylic painting, charcoal, graphite, and oil sticks. The artistic language of her expressive multi-colored lines, layered onto compact pastel-colored or pure white backgrounds, produces lyrical arrangements that evoke natural movement and atmospheric effects reminiscent of wide-open landscapes. The movement of her lines extends beyond the boundaries of the canvas, thus turning her paintings into meditations on weightlessness and infinity. Her profound knowledge of both eastern and western artistic traditions enables her to simultaneously draw inspiration from Taoism, but also dance, music, and the martial arts. She succeeds in marrying a Neo-Expressionist approach to painting with eastern artistic traditions. The large scale of her canvases allows her to break free but also sweeps the viewers along and invites them to unlock their own imaginative spaces, freely discover her work for themselves, and associate it with their own thoughts and feelings. For both artists, abstraction is a way to free the spirit and find their own individual artistic language. Building upon their native cultural and intellectual traditions and drawing inspiration from western art movements, focusing particularly on color schemes and the expressivity of the line, they have developed cross-cultural approaches to abstraction that speak to both western and non-western audiences.

Isabel Wünsche is Professor of art and art History at Constructor University Bremen since 2001.