Things disappear

FIFTY years ago, abstraction was widely considered to be not only the most significant art movement of its time but the culmination of the whole history of painting.

FIFTY years ago, abstraction was widely considered to be not only the most significant art movement of its time but the culmination of the whole history of painting.

Today, a century after abstraction's first triumphs and at a time when its hegemony is long past, it is worth looking back on the emergence of this important movement in the art of the 20th century.

This is the subject of a learned and thoughtfully assembled exhibition by Terence Maloon at the Art Gallery of NSW. The exhibition covers the period 1867 to 1917 and its title, Paths to Abstraction, suggests it will follow several currents rather than a single linear development.

Maloon's exhibition is a good example of the kind of project that should be encouraged in Australia. While we may legitimately import foreign touring shows, it is clearly also important to foster research and art-historical scholarship of the highest level in this country.

Paths to Abstraction is accompanied by an excellent catalogue, including text by Maloon and valuable contributions from Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Richard Shiff and Annegret Hoberg. There are useful discussions both of the evolution of various stylistic tendencies and of contemporary theories of non-representational art, all of which are helpful to anyone seeking a closer understanding of this period.

At its height, abstraction was promoted as the very essence of painting, finally arrived at by a centuries-long process of subtraction. Pictures that represented the world of visual appearances, or recognisable figures and stories, were considered only the first primitive manifestations of an art whose final consummation was to be found in flat surfaces of colour that referred to nothing outside themselves.

There were always many problems with this account. The first was the historicist fallacy that presented art as moving in a linear or progressive fashion: a fallacy particularly prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In reality, there are greater and lesser moments in the history of art, but only the most naive imagine that each phase in art represents a progress over the preceding ones.

The forms of artistic expression change with the concerns and sensibilities of their times, but what is gained in one area is paid for with sacrifices in others. Renaissance perspective was a great invention, but its rational lucidity was paid for in transcendence; chiaroscuro was important, but it involved sacrificing large areas of the earlier clarity of vision, and so on.

The other question, still a matter of intense disagreement, is whether painting can really have significance without reference to the world of experience. Words cannot, even though meaning is partly determined by the internal relations of linguistic signs within a system.

Imagine trying to write a poem with acoustic effects but no semantic content; in fact you don't have to imagine it, because it was done by Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and the experiment fortunately does not need to be repeated.

Those who believe in the enduring viability of abstract painting liken it to music. Music does not rely on semantic reference in the same way, but creates a self-sufficient order of melodies and harmonies: an order that has a metaphorical relation to the world of experience, so we can feel that a musical composition expresses the heroism, tragic vision or demoralisation of its time.

On the other hand, it can be argued that, far from being the consummation of the art of painting, abstraction was a 20th-century anomaly, fundamentally an understandable but ultimately untenable retreat to higher ground before the onslaught of mass society and the vulgarity of commercial culture.

One of the most persistent fallacies associated with the promotion of abstraction was that painting before the impressionists condemned the brush mark to invisibility. What was admired, we are still told today, was a seamlessly finished surface in which the making of the picture disappeared behind the effect of illusion.

You don't have to look very far to see how, in reality, the visible mark of the painter has always been appreciated as a trace of his hand and his genius. Perhaps the most obvious example is the brushwork of a Titian, a Velazquez or a Rembrandt; but the more discriminating eye will see the same thing even in Raphael or Vermeer, with their higher degree of finish.

The 17th-century French critic Freart de Chambray cited, disapprovingly as it happens, a sample of the language of contemporary connoisseurs. They speak of "freshness and lightness of pigments, freedom of the brush, bold marks, impasto and richness of colour, well-detached masses . . . masterful brushstrokes . . . fine contours . . . the softness of skin hues . . . fine passages of painting" and many other things.

What viewers appreciate in paintings is their dual nature: painted surfaces made of artificial pigments forming shapes and harmonies and contrasts, which are at the same time the picture of something else.

But all fallacies have some basis in fact, and the invisibility of the artist's hand is no exception. There was a kind of academic art in the 19th century that purported to be following the great tradition but had really lost its way, and which did in fact seek to produce seamless illusions.

There are plenty of examples in the Art Gallery of NSW, some in the Victorian Visions exhibition reviewed here a few weeks ago. What happened to these artists can probably be explained by the rise of photography, which seemed to make representing the world so easy -- another fallacy -- but which was still confined to black and white.

Painting retained the advantage of colour, and the academic hyper-realists of the time produced very strange pictures that are in a sense the bastards of photography, and which had the almost inevitable consequence of provoking a reaction among those painters who had a deeper understanding of the art of painting and its great traditions.

This is the context in which one can understand the works with which the exhibition begins, the almost monochromatic Thames views by Whistler. The artist gives them musical titles, the purpose of which is to make his audience look more closely at the forms, harmonies of tones and hues, and substance of the painting.

Whistler's minimalist approach evokes the mysterious darkness of the sleeping city.

Something similar could be said of Seurat's tonal drawings: intriguingly reductive but effective only because of their continued reference to trees, houses and other identifiable forms. What we see here, as so often in early modernism, is not abstraction in a simplistic sense but a process of abstracting, an attempt to slow down the process of recognition, to allow the opening of the mind in wonder, rather than the premature conclusions of literalism.

Vuillard is an interesting example of this tendency. He tries to undo the banal naturalism of the everyday, and at the same time to evoke very concretely the way our experience is a factor of our environment, and specifically our domestic surroundings.

Vuillard captures the smallness of contemporary urban life; he makes one think of Eliot's Prufrock, who has measured out his life with coffee spoons. The colours of Vuillard's interiors are as restricted as the spiritual life they house, and yet they are quite free of angst. All the same, his picture of an open window on to Lake Leman is like a breath of fresh air.

The little room of prints is particularly interesting. Gauguin's compositions of symbolic figures inspired by Polynesian culture, and Derain's friezes of dancing women, are a reclaiming of the figure and its potential for dominating and shaping composition: something lost by academic naturalists.

Derain's Nudes in a Landscape, like all the figure work of Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse around the turn of the century, looks back to the art of the renaissance and even the reliefs of antiquity. Franz Marc's woodblock of a lion hunt after Delacroix makes the aspiration quite clear.

The first works that appear to have no external reference at all are the little ink drawings by Arp of around 1916. They are, however, extremely carefully planned, not in the least gestural, as may at first appear, but sketched out with pencil before being filled in with wash, and above all strangely self-contained, like mute little monadic beings.

Colour, in contrast, explodes in a rather disorderly way with the Fauves, joyful at times and at others merely clumsy; it would later settle down into a new order in the hands of Matisse, but in the period after the conclusion of this survey.

Robert and Sonia Delaunay look less convincing with the passing of time. As a style, Orphism is at its best in Sonia Delaunay's decorative border to Blaise Cendrars's Prose du Transsiberien or Robert's Windows Open Simultaneously. But its lack of intellectual rigour is apparent in the three versions of Nude woman reading, which grow increasingly incoherent, unable to manage the relation between abstract pattern, semi-abstracted form and representation.

Although Delaunay was associated with the Munich group Der Blaue Reiter, Orphism is completely different from the ethos developed by Marc, Wassily Kandinsky and their associates, who sought to express passion and above all spiritual insight through the use of abstract form and vibrant colour.

Marc and Kandinsky's conception of the avant-garde is discussed in Hoberg's illuminating essay; there is a tragic pathos in the exaltation with which they write of the coming of a new age of spirituality on the eve of the most terrible war the world had ever known, in which Marc himself, with so many others, would perish.

Looking at Kandinsky's work, one has to ask whether it really is spirituality that he expresses, or just a kind of irrational state of excitedness. And given the horrors wrought in the 20th century by the excited and the exalted, and those with visions of wonderful new orders, it is hard not to feel reticent about such unleashing of irrational energy.

Cubism is different from Orphism in its almost puritanical avoidance of colour, and from Kandinsky's abstraction in its detached rationalism. But it is never quite abstract, either. Cubism is one of the best examples of the abstract as a present participle rather than noun: abstracting in order to see the world afresh, rather than abstraction as the end of a journey.