THE NOVELTY of exciting new forms of painting and sculpture born since the second decade of the 20th Century, cooling down during the 20s and 30s, then picking up again after the end of World War II in 1945 and sweeping the world until the 1980s, was the result of an attitude, a disposition, a conception of human significance which these two generations of modern artists shared.
Thinking about how this whole creative direction took off in the 20th Century is important to our understanding of why painting and sculpture differs drastically today, and why the world today demands a continuation of the exciting novelty of such paintings and sculptures which existed up to the mid-1980s at least.
Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings and collage/assemblages between 1910 and 20, which began the ‘Cubist’ style (not their term, but one invented by a critic) is important, not simply because it was different from what had gone before in Western European art, but because it reflected creative changes in the world due to Imperialism/Colonialism, but not subservient to its divisive social or aesthetic values.
The individual creative freedom of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, as well as other European artists of their period, who were influenced by styles of non-Western creativity from Africa, Asia, and the pre-Columbian Americas, was contrary to the materialistic exploitive colonial intentions of European powers abroad.
It came as a surprise to many of these same colonials that the styles of artifacts from these non-Western regions of the world were actually influential in changing the visual art of their continental European civilization, and modern civilization on the whole, in an entirely new direction, at odds with their stagnant hieratic views of what drawing, painting, and sculpture should look like.
Is art only the realistic reproduction of how people, or animals (or anything) look? Or how they worship, or dance, or live socially? If that were true, art would possess only a historical documentary meaning, with the implication that societies and cultures are defined one way forever, never changing, or needing to learn or adopt anything new from anywhere or anyone else outside their own geographic location or race.
Yet, even the detailed realistic style of East Indian sculpture can be traced to the influence of Greek antique sculpture, via the expansion of Greek culture in India, particularly under Alexander the Great.
Similarly, the peculiar presence of Rock Art engraving among the ancient Bushmen in South Africa is traced to very distant North African, Saharan, and prehistoric Iberian culture. If we look carefully into the evolution of the art of most cultures, we will see evidence of similar cultural transfusions, which can generate both progressions or regressions, according to the tranquility or social agitation of the influences accepted.
However, the latest technical processes of communication, whether radio, TV, film, or computer/Internet, are by no means an absolute basis for actual cultural documentation anywhere, since their focus on topics may be limited by the choice and limited knowledge of those making reports.
The value of new forms of art arises from the ongoing discovery of qualities previously unknown or disregarded by biased one-sided, one-dimensional views uninterested in the careful consideration of creative methods, whether of words, images, structures, materials, etc. For example, the attitude of most Christian missionaries to wooden sculptures and collage/assemblages they first saw in tropical Africa was one of condemnation, based on an opinion of these works as heathen idols, false gods.
It is only later that other more intellectual and scientific, rather than subjectively biased Europeans perceived that the strange jagged geometrical style of African wood sculpture was meant to visually emphasize the living energy in matter; in other words, reveal the hidden or invisible power which motivates the growth of the tree from which both the wood and its derivative, sculpture, come. The jagged style was a way of visualizing movement dynamically. These African sculptures were being quite reverential to the divine ‘Creator’ or ‘creation’ after all.
This discovery of how art could “give duration to genesis,” in the words of one of Europe’s greatest modern artists, the Swiss, Paul Klee, who was strongly influenced by both African and Pre-Columbian art, became one of the philosophical foundations for the eclectic fusion which generates the progressive power of modern art.
Yet, at the same time of this new flexible formation of the leading art of the early 20th Century, these new works by those who would gradually rise to be some of the best Artists of Europe — Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Klee, Miro, Modigliani, Brancusi, Balla, Severini, Henry Moore, etc — were not as popular or accepted by established European society as other European artists of that time, whom we hardly remember or discuss today.
The modern artists mentioned here were going in the opposite direction to the vanity of European naturalistic and figurative art, which was imposed on the colonized, and their firm dynamic contribution to a new concept and form of art involving the equal participation of non-Western styles redefined human values as not simply the outward form and colour of the world’s races, but a non-figurative abstract value that went beyond materialistic definitions of beauty into the realm of a broader spiritual egalitarian recognition and emphasis of the human values, not restricted or defined by ethnological compartments of earthly life.
When, in 1907, Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ scandalized the art world by his painting African-styled masks on pink-skinned, uninhibited European women, the implications were deep and multiple, evoking social values of human equality (Picasso was a social artist) that transcended mere subjective definitions or preferences of figurative/facial standards of beauty, penetrating to our primal subconscious where the raw fertile organic sexuality of life is preserved.
George Braque ended his career on a similar note of raw non-synthetic masterpieces, based on the contents of his studio, in which — from 1949 to 56 in eight large paintings — the most eclectic jumble of objects, from the primitive to the metropolitan — jugs, jars, objects, zig-zag and lattice-work decor, classical busts etc — jostle each-other, causing our eyes to rove on over-lapping time periods, time-spans, from distant lands and cultures to today’s styles.
In the midst of this, a clumsily painted bird keeps flying through each studio space. Why this haphazard and non-technical method of depiction? Because the raw and the intuitive must not be erased; it represents, by its unsophisticated novelty and obscurity, the original organic nature of the planet.
Matisse, too, would adopt the bright colours and flat spatial shapes of the primeval South Seas and Oceania, where he lived for awhile. But most of all, his brand new collage series of the 1940s ,called ‘JAZZ’, evoked the brassy, undulating, intricate rhythms of jazzmen like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, also the sensual rhythmic dancing of the beautiful Afro-American dancer, Josephine Baker, all of which he loved.
The importance of Matisse’s interest in such non-European sources has nothing to do with imitation, but preservation of the value of the non-Western. But only by taking it out of its familiar original ethnic context, and placing it in juxtaposition within a modern artistic innovation is its equality demonstrated in the contemporary world.
This is the creative value that threatens to be lost or forgotten in the increasing saturation of one-dimensional technical civilization across the world today. Yet the enduring quest of abstraction in painting is the exploration of what is not limited by transient trends, but remains perpetually felt in the spirit.
Kandinsky, the indispensable part-Asiatic Russian practitioner and theorist of abstraction in painting, wrote and published ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ in 1911, and it remains the greatest pioneering theoretical foundation of modern painting in which an aesthetic, based on form and colour, assists us towards practical harmony in life, rather than reliance solely on the good intentions of sentimental language.
Kandinsky wrote: “It must be remembered that an unsuitable combination of form and colour is not necessarily discordant, but may show the way to fresh possibilities of harmony.”
And also: “Form in the narrow sense, is nothing but the separation line between surfaces of colour. That is its outer meaning. But it has also an inner meaning…and properly speaking, form is the outward expression of this inner meaning.”
This inner meaning has nothing to do with some specific utilitarian practical action, but stimulates an inner vibration, an inner need which is felt as harmony over discord and agitation.
After the end of World War II in 1945, many European abstract painters, along with their outstanding non-Western peers they befriended, such as the Cuban ,Wifredo Lam; the Chilean, Roberto Matta; the Uruguayan, Torres-Garcia; the Algerian, Jean Atlan; the Chinese, Zao Wou Ki; the Japanese, Kenso Okada and Kumi Sugai, among many others, took a spiritual reverence for the planetary makeup and our human response to it to diverse new stylistic heights, still unrivalled today.
France’s Pierre Soulages never got over seeing the dark, cobwebbed derelict beams of ruined, bombed-out churches and farmhouses leftover from the world war, as he worked as a farmhand in France’s countryside in summer.
His stunning, dark, abstract paintings, illuminated by flashes of colour on the edge of large, random structural brushstrokes reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese signs, made him into one of the 20th Century’s greatest abstract painters.
Similarly, the Italian, Alberto Burri, a doctor briefly interned in a concentration camp for captured Italian troops, became one of the best abstract collagists, suggesting the importance of food in trying circumstances by crudely sewing together old ripped and damaged jute bags that once contained sugar, rice, wheat etc.
His exhibitions of these and other ‘poor’ rearranged materials, like scorched food crates and scorched plastic, shocked but rocketed him to firm prominence in the history of modern art. Never had abstract presentation been so real!
Emilio Vedova of Venice was another prominent post-war Italian abstract painter, whose enormous sympathy for the poor of shanty towns around the world influenced his sagging wooden doors and crudely nailed-together planks brilliantly painted in passionate, colourful abstract brushstrokes. He punched holes in large canvasses, and thread them with heavy rope among his wooden pieces, which made art galleries look like crucial slums.
Mimmo Rotella collected and rearranged all the torn bits of colourful cinema posters he religiously collected, sometimes photographing them, and fixing them on canvasses. He also became one of the most unique and exciting collagists of the century.
Afro Basadella became the master of a sensitive, subtle, musical, abstract style that left us speechless with its tricky off-hand detail, and flights of misty memory. In general, the post-war Italian artists dominated the abstract art scene with their bold effective ingenuity. We can say the same of the Spanish from Madrid and Barcelona especially, who used plaster and cloth, and had a deft sense of deeply emotional style; artists like Antonio Clave, Tapies, Milarres, Feito, Viola.
The Dutch abstractionists, like the pessimistic Bram Van Velde; the primitive exuberant Karel Appel; the simple yet complex Corneille; the wonderfully graphic and comic-book-styled Alechinsky of Belgium, all held up the perennial worth of organic non-Western values in their works.
Northern Europe excelled in the exceptional vibrantly-colourful abstract paintings of Alan Davie of Scotland. A jazz musician, Davie’s interest in tropical pre-Columbian forms separated him as an energetic hero of new abstract painting.
North American art gave up its imitation of European naturalism and realism when they turned to the stunning abstract pre-historic art of Native tribes, whose culture was one of the most beautiful and paradisiac the world has ever known.
All the best abstract expressionists, except De Kooning, Kline, and Gorky, were under the influence of abstract structures and rock art of these Native Peoples, who never knew figurative realism until the 19th Century when missionaries taught them pictorial art, which they felt would be commercially accepted by visiting white tourists.
Pollock, Still, Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman and Francis were all influenced by indigenous American art. The ascendancy of American modern art in New York encouraged the illusion that it was the centre of contemporary painting. In fact, in neighbouring Toronto, Canada in the 1980s, a style one New York critic called ‘exotic modernism’ emerged under the influence of the late Jack Bush, with his stunningly simple and thoughtful abstract paintings.
This was continued by David Bolduc’s brilliantly eclectic head and serenely spatial sign language; the late Eric Gamble’s wonderful reinterpretations of Gaugin and Kandinsky’s sensual musical lyricism (Gamble was also the leader of a Rock band); Alex Cameron’s witty quirky tropicality and fusion-jazz influences; and Gordon Rayner’s lush heavy impasto rhythms, inspired by his trips to the Amazon.
The Toronto abstract exoticism was inspired by the real influx of immigrants from China, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, India and the Far East etc, as well as the fact that they went back to early 20the Century art by Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Klee, and the Russian Avant-garde to emerge with fresh insights into the world’s organic survival.
Behind all this was the heroic staggering energy and beauty of Canada’s greatest abstract painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, of Quebec, who is certainly one of the most awesome painters the modern age has known.
The tendency of new trends in art replacing work already done may provide commercial opportunities for artists, art dealers, and curators, but in the end, such new work must be judged against the previous creative record that already stands, and more important, by the necessity of the benign human and planetary values such
creative work established.
