(Left) ‘Woman and Child’ by an artist of the Dogon people (Ebony wood). (Right) ‘Adam and Eve’ by Constantin Bancusi

ABSTRACTION IN art became apparent but nameless when humans first sought to artistically express the concept of creation.

This also led to the invention of the linguistic concept of God, or Gods, an original power which brings things to the level of real life, whether botanical, human, or animal.

The original physical condition of mankind was isolation in various geographical environments. Out of this isolation, the three main branches of the human race — the Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasian races — emerged.

They all seemed to be born with an inner desire or compulsion to comprehend their origin, and out of this compulsion first emerged the creation of many figurative objects. Some regarded them as idols or Gods, made wholly or partly in their own self-image, or, in other words, of their same race.

Abstraction, however, was not absent from elements surrounding these figurative creations; abstraction lay in the physical way in which figures were presented; in the colours and shapes of the materials on which the work was done; how the objects surrounding these figures were arranged in relation to each other, among other creative aspects. Abstraction was like an egalitarian background spirit to specific realistic figurative duplication.

For example, if we look as far back as the palaeolithic European cave paintings made 15,000 years ago in Altamira, Spain, Lascaux, France, and across palaeolithic Europe, despite their free-wheeling outlines made by dark markings and relief gouging denoting horses, bison, bulls, even rhinoceros, plus the smeared application of pigment by the naked hand on rocky earthen walls, as well as graphic abstract signs, all this predicts both methods and directions toward the exciting development of international abstract art today.

Indeed, the method of smearing, staining, creating marks and colours by removing the top layer of a natural surface was shared by ancient cultures extremely distant from each other, and no doubt unknown to each other primarily on the continents of Europe, Africa, Australia and Pre-Columbian America.

This style of art later came to be known as petroglyphs, because they were done on rocks. Evidence of our informal, non-figurative human identity is revealed when we look for “the essential elements from an intangible multiplicity of forms,” as Giedion states in his profound and seminal study: ‘The Eternal Present’.

Abstraction, therefore, holds the spirit and seeds of our human identity alive within the multiplicity of our diverse cultures, because it is concerned with the universal and vital life-force which flows through all life everywhere on earth. Herbert Read, in his valuable book, ‘A History Of Modern Sculpture’, tells us the Chinese referred to this universal life-force as ‘Ch’i’, and it is not surprising that the ancient Oriental art of the fast brush stroke in ink, and the throwing of ink from the painter’s brush on a surface, seeking whatever painted shapes or forms are created of their own accord, and therefore not contingent, was one of the methods adopted by international abstract painters.

Many painters no doubt understood that the energetic brushstroke or similar method of applying paint, following no prescribed pattern or contour, celebrated the very joy of our human pulse, and our absorption into an emotional and intellectual object of contemplation. Such contemplation keeps our human faculties alert, active, and creatively productive. This is why in some of the most all-round progressive societies across the world today, abstract art has long played a vital and important role.

The pre-Columbian Americas, North, Central and South, regarded as the most naturally magical and mysterious continent and cultures on earth, laid the foundation for many profound cosmic manifestations of the human identity in abstract creations of art.

The ancient Mayan word concept, ‘Itz’, like the Chinese ‘Ch’i’, also communicates our vital human identity by referring to actual liquid or organic substances such as tears, sweat, milk, blood, semen, native to all human or biological forms.

It considers these substances, including others from nature, such as flower-nectar, tree gum, and maize as magical divine items relating us to the ‘otherworld’, whose identity exceeds our various specific material appearances.

The word ‘Itz’, in fact, is part of the Mayan name ‘Itzama’, which, in their mythology, is the name of the first shaman, and one of the ‘gods’ who drew the constellations in the sky at the dawn of creation.

Not surprisingly again, Itzama is also a personification of the Cosmic Bird. This mythological combination of God, Man and bird is a way of linking our human identity to other identities different from ourselves, and can be found in most original cultures. However, pre-Columbian art and society were also influenced by harsh early experiences throughout an untamed continent dominated by powerful animals and cataclysmic geographical or ecological forces, huge mastadons, jaguars, alligators, serpents, volcanoes, mountains, caves, etc.

Such a reality became a myth of creation for early American cultures and art, a magico-religious expression of Man’s dependent relationship to the ‘Gods’ they fashioned. Yet, there was a constant intelligent desire to depict the essential formal elements generating the outward forms of reality. For this reason, much of the most advanced and technically imaginative art was totally abstract, because it was an intellectual vocation of artist/priests, whose works, like the façade of the Nunnery Quadrangle in the Mayan Yucatan, was a stone deity made from superimposed abstract masks influenced by components of the human face.

Almost 14,000 years ago, such artists began to realise that if ‘God’ or ‘The Gods’ is a supreme power, it could not originate or derive from the human features of any one race of humans. Abstraction in early art was therefore the first steps towards the expression of our collective human identity.

In ancient Asia, especially India, Thailand and Java, early abstraction took the form of what women dancers did with their bodies, their hands and feet. It was abstraction delivered by dance and theatre, amazing physical body sign language.

In ancient stone friezes, such figuration reek of meditative implications and spectacular, almost psychedelic, forms of décor, spirals, proliferating curves, etc, accompanying sensual expressions by female asparas on temples like Baital Deul, Karnak, Mahadev, and the Great Stupa at Sanchi.

Their influence on abstract art comes from their preserved energetic forms carved in stone, their spatial arrangement around figures, and most interesting, the invisible subject matter of meditating Buddhas. What are these perfectly figurative Buddhas contemplating? Certainly not material realities. Abstract art is also comparable to the visualization of pure contemplative discipline within the Buddha’s head.

In ancient Moorish or Moslem art, the contemplation of geometric designs in architecture, carpet weaving, mosaic tiles, etc, became a firm guide towards a more formal, optical constructive abstraction being made today.

It was tropical African sculpture which — thanks to the French and Spanish pioneers of modern abstract art, such as Cezanne, Matisse, Derain, Picasso and Braque — came to provide the profound spiritual source of our human identity, by its transformation of the human figure into a unique artistic form.

In the sculpture ‘Woman And Child’, made by an anonymous artist of the Dogon people of Mali — one of the most contemplatively advanced and cosmic-minded tribes among tropical Africa’s extremely talented people, despite the obvious ethnic topic of the sculpture (since these African people, like many other peoples, lived totally among themselves long ago), and the subsequent similarity of appearance between mother and children, this work is not a realistic representation of any African person, in the same way that many other European or Asian sculptors depicted their people.

‘Woman and Child’ is made almost totally by a direct combination of curves, angles, lines, planes, cones, prisms and diamonds. In short: Figurative geometry. This highly intellectual and abstract method of creating a figure is not simply carving, but dynamic sculpture, which is more than the inscribing of designs on wood, but rather sophisticated drawing in space, and drawing with space, a concave convex integration of its form and shape with its surrounding space, which is demonstrated by its ability to cast equally abstract shadows, an aspect that less creative sculpture and carving do not produce.

Why did the Dogon sculptor work in such a fashion? To capture the egalitarian life-force; the invisible abstract aesthetic which defines the source of human identity. Compare the Dogon sculpture to another by one of the greatest early modern abstract European sculptors, Constantin Brancusi of Rumania.

Brancusi’s ‘Adam and Eve’ was done between 1916 and 1919; by then, African sculpture was a collector’s item among Europe’s leading abstract artists. But when we look at European illustrations of Adam and Eve, they are depicted like a Caucasian couple.

Later, it was said they should have been depicted as a Negroid couple. But Brancusi saw something entirely different, which concerned the whole human identity in the concept or myth of Adam and Eve. If this couple is the ancestors of all humanity, what is it that produced that? Brancusi’s famous sculpture in New York’s Guggenheim Museum today is an example of abstraction that went beyond the ethnocentric concept of Adam and Eve being of any one race, by sculpting the basic form of the human penis, scrotum, ribs, vagina, the in-and-out movement of copulation, among other things, in an abstract manner, subtly echoing ancient primeval artistic sources, so that his ‘Adam and Eve’, in various woods, refers to no specific race, but to all which collectively share our human identity.