ABSTRACT ART HISTORY
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It is by no means easy, at this stage, to give a generally acceptable definition of abstract art. From one standpoint it is evident that its authority and range have so widened in recent years that there are few or no young artists, however great or slight their ability, who have no share whatever in its development, at least through some particular aspect of their work. On the other hand we must not overlook the fact that certain artists, and by no means the least important, are suspicious of the term 'abstract' art, if not of the thing itself, and that they try to adopt a noncommittal position in order to safeguard their own individualism, seeing present-day 'Abstract' painters as mere offshoots or hangers-on of the earlier abstractionists. Thus critical jargon falls back on terms like content and legibility or readability as if a human work could possibly be devoid of content, and as if a painted work could conform to the same requirements as a written text. But even in literature the readable is not necessarily good, any more than what is unreadable.
But no amount of painting with 'content' or more readable content can save artists from inevitably belonging to their own time. However much they recoil from the term, the painted object which is carried out of their studio shows them to be just as 'abstract' as those whom they denounce as a clique. Their arguments are of no avail, because, in the mid-twentieth century, in matters of art the spirit of the age has firmly lodged itself in abstraction. This is so much the case that we now automatically approach and interpret all works of art, whether ancient or modern, according to abstract data and principles. Faced with some Old Master, the mind of 1955 man tends to interpret in terms of composition, points of technique, psychological details, and we try to penetrate into the character of the man himself by revealing, through a minute analysis of the work of art, the reservations and discoveries, the hesitations and audacities of the painter. Our admiration swings between a synthesis effected on broad schematic lines and an analysis of craftsmanship, while we tend to forget at the same time that the spectator of a few centuries ago was concerned with nothing but the 'subject' in the proper sense of the term, the what and not the how.
For some of us the Sistine Madonna is one of Raphael's finest works because of its outstandingly powerful composition. For the painter's contemporaries this sense of power no doubt lay in the expressive faces of the Virgin and Child. But nowadays we are less attracted by things in themselves than by the way in which they are presented: we find a man's manner of walking more revealing than his objective. The hundreds of little strokes criss-crossed and juxtaposed in bewildering variety on the back of Rembrandt Recumbent Negress afford us more visual pleasure than the woman's back itself, for there are better specimens to be found in albums of photographers' nudes, while we are delighted to find an amplification of Rembrandt's strokes in an abstract by De Staël. This seems to bring an understanding of Rembrandt within the layman's reach and at the same time to demonstrate De Staël's greatness as a draughtsman. In the simplest possible terms, we are looking at art through glasses appropriate to the century we are living in, and not through those we inherit from previous generations. Whether people like it or not these modern 'glasses' exist and are nothing more nor less than abstraction. However bitterly the schools and dealers might wrangle over the word's possible meanings, we see all art in terms of its abstract qualities, regardless of its degree of figurativeness or non-figurativeness, representation or nonrepresentation, objectivity or subjectivity.
In any case it is thanks to these squabbles and barrages of apparently futile arguments that abstract art has extended its influence wherever young artists are trained all over the world, as well as penetrating the circles of dealers and amateurs. We need not worry unduly over the historical errors brought about through hasty journalism, nor over half-baked definitions, quibbles over terminology, nor even the bullying and anger that accompanied this change: all this creates a stir and serves to draw the attention of a 'general' public impervious to everything but shouts and posters. After the sandwich-boards comes the show itself, and something positive remains which is gradually sifted and shaped in the mind. It is then time for the historian and the detached interpreter to begin their work.
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