20th century AD

National Review, May 6, 1996 by James Gardner

A LEAFLET accompanying the Guggenheim's massive "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century" show introduces children to the joys of non-representational art. It begins with an illustration of one of Vasily Kandinsky's jazzy geometrics from the Twenties. "How do these colors make you feel?" the leaflets asks. There follows one of the juicier passages from Pollock's Number Three. "Put your arms in the air and pretend to toss and drip paint carefully onto the floor." Finally, a detail of Sans II by the short-lived and ever-anguished Eva Hesse, with the query, "What do you think these materials feel like?"

So we have come, at last, to this: One of the most radical revolutions, perhaps the most radical, in the history of visual expression, a revolution that once was met with anger and mockery when not ignored, a revolution that raised cries of Communist plots, has now been so thoroughly assimilated into our culture that children, apparently, can appreciate it without much of a stretch.

It is precisely this acceptance that is the hidden theme of this most celebratory of shows. There is no heavy message here, as so often in recent exhibitions, whose art seems to be nothing but a pretext for verbiage. Rather we have one example after another of fine abstract art from the past nine decades, art that is unique to our century, and as such entirely our own. One could point out many omissions: the Bauhaus and the Russian avant-garde are given short shrift, and especially in the latter part of the show one may ask why no room was allotted to Pat Steir, Phillip Taafe, or Ju- lian Schnabel, who are fundamental to understanding the state of abstraction at this time. Yet it must be emphasized that this is not an historical exhibition.

Primarily in the nature of a celebration, this show presents us with an unbalanced, prejudiced, and irrepressibly enthusiastic ode to the most representative development in the visual culture of our century. Among its many beauties are Piet Mondrian's Composition 1916, a densely electric tangle of lavender, peach, and pink squares. Kandinsky's far more eccentric and lyrical Painting with White Border from three years earlier, a moody interpretation of a rainbow of tags and patches, reveals its origin in Russian folk art. From half a century later, there is Yves Klein's Untitled Blue Monochrome, as deep and dense and fanatical a massing of blue as you will ever see. And from a generation later, Gerhard Richter's superb December with its icy accumulation of blacks and greys, relieved only by patches of mocha brown, all given the famous stripped-canvas treatment he pioneered.

Such art fulfills the famous claim of Walter Pater that "All art is constantly aspiring to the condition of music" -- his way of saying that while music's form was its content, all the other arts, though aspiring to this condition, were still trammeled by the ideas behind them: paintings by what they depicted, be it a bowl of fruit or the Prince of Wales; poetry by ideas contained in the words; etc. To break free from such restraints -- for they were perceived as such -- was, in an important sense, the grand strategy of all the arts in the first half of this century. And they had succeeded in this mission by the end of the first quarter of the 1900s, in the prose of Joyce, the dance of Ruth Saint-Denis, and the music of Schoenberg, no less than in the art of Kandinsky.

Great revolutions in art have tended to begin slowly, like Gothic architecture, which was a century in the making before it achieved the perfection of Amiens; like the depiction of motion in two dimensions, which Florentine art had struggled toward for five decades before the Sistine ceiling. Kandinsky's earliest abstractions, however, like the poems of Homer, place us at once at the highest levels of fulfillment within a genre.

Since then hundreds of abstract artists have created truly memorable objects in a language that is in one sense unique to each of them and in another nearly universal. It says something not only about these individual artists, but also about our culture that they should have created for the first time an infinitely varied and supremely eloquent language based solely on the beauty and resonance of immanent form. It would now require a leap of our historical imaginations to recall how inconceivable the very idea was less than a century ago.

But the success of this revolution has not been uncontested. The political take on abstract art comes in roughly four different forms, two of the Left and two of the Right. Undoubtedly, the liberating of the arts from their ancient fealty to content and to reality was seen by many early in this century as essentially liberal, as striking a blow against the establishment, while uniting us in the fraternity of aesthetic relevance. But in due course, the excellence of this art -- at least as I interpret it --caused serious people to admire it for intellectual rigor, which were entirely consonant with conservative thought. This, if I may summarize their thinking, is the thrust of The New Criterion's editors.