University Daily Kansan / Tuesday, October 20, 1987
Tuesday Forum
5
Many art students and historians laugh at the child-like appearance of modern art, with its abstract shapes and colors. But modern art expresses the explosion of industrialism, progress and confidence embodied in the 19th and 20th centuries.
John Blum/SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
John Blum/SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
Albert Bierstadt's "Sunset on the Plain," top left, incorporates elements of modern, abstract art in its embellished vision of the scene. The work is a 1961 gift to the museum from the Hon. Charles V. Kincail in memory of Edith T. Kincai.
A Guided Tour
Untitled Drawing, above, a work by David Smith, is among the works of Abstract Expressionists, where line, color form and medium are combined to create a seemingly three-dimensional image.
Harry Bertola's "Musical Sculpture," top right, appeals to the senses of sight and sound. The wired beaded rods, when agitated, create gentle, humming musical sounds. The work is a 1980 bequest of Donald Hatch in memory of Mary Bole Hatch.
Abstract art poses puzzle with its complex simplicity
By SUSAN BAKER
A class of introductory art history students laughed once when I showed them Kasimir Malevich's painting "White on White." The modernist work consisted solely of a white rectangle painted on a white ground. The students could not believe I was seriously discussing the canvas as "art." They never laughed at Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling frescoes. Perhaps they sensed the historic greatness of Michelangelo. Yet any art historian would tell you that Malevich, while not a Michelangelo, has great artistic significance for modern times. Why is it so difficult to see the "art" in Malevich?
These students are not the only critics of modernism. I've been told, even by fellow art historians, that modern art galleries in museums are the most challenging to understand.
How are we to understand modern art, with its child-like appearance and seeming lack of artistic skill? In general, the term modernism is used to describe a break from the past. Its historical beginnings are associated with the industrial era of progress, a confidence in science and a belief in political democracy. It shirks authority, but in doing so calls for a questioning of values that can be both exhilarating and exasperating.
In art, modernism expresses itself in an explosion of styles. Historians of the 19th and 20th centuries have developed an array of terms — Romanticicism, Realism, Impressionism, Cubism — to categorize the variety of forms that appear. If a unifying characteristic is to be found, it is a tendency toward abstraction, and it is exactly this aspect of art that can be the most troubling, that causes students to laugh. Using our own Spencer Museum of Art at the museum of Krasova, let us take a closer look at the work of some 19th and 20th century American painters to help explain how abstraction became so important to modern artists.
Let us begin by looking at the 19th-century landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). Bierstadt, of course, is no abstract painter. Like other members of the Hudson River School with which he was associated, Bierstadt tended to describe nature in detail. But then, Bierstadt tried to make nature more beautiful by perfecting its features on canvas. His "Sunset on the Plain" shows this tendency. Every aspect of the scene is carefully described as the artist saw it, a calm, yellow-orange sky, a quiet, intimate lake and grazing animals. At the same time, nowhere on Earth could there be a sky quite so beautiful, a lake so pleasing. Some even accused Bierstadt of grandstanding in order to conjure patriotic feelings about the American frontier in his predominately American audience. Bierstadt was not simply copying what he saw, but was idealizing and visualizing, then manufacturing the best possible world.
accurate in its description of an average American landscape, yet through artistic "know-how" Bierstadt elevated the experience of nature to something greater than ordinary visual experience. It is the recognition and appreciation of Bierstadt's ability with the medium of paint that is impressive; seeing that with a paint brush he could render what was seen with the eye onto a two-dimensional surface and make that rendering look like something — and a beautiful something at that.
The result was a work of art of a quality no one would deny. It is
When you consider the artist's plight as one of the form-finding, and form-rendering in this manner, it makes sense that a fascination with the expressive powers of artistic material would result. The 20th-century contribution was to recognize the artists' capacity to itself, apart from the object portrayed. The tools of painting became the art, not the object being mirrored.
A group of German Expressionist artists, known as the "Blau Reiter," or the Blue Rider, began in the early part of this century to explore the expressive possibilities of color, line and form as elements used as something other than tools for representing an object. The theories of Wassily Kandinsky, as expressed in his book *The Art of Mind*, dominated their thinking. Kandinsky called for a spiritual revolution in art that allowed artists to express their inner experience of nature in abstract, non-material terms.
This attempt to let the tools of painting be expressive elements in and of themselves is actually quite an old idea. Periods of abstraction have occurred throughout the history of art, both in the Western and non-Western worlds. Abstraction in the modern world began at the latest with Cubism in 1907, and totally nonfigurative art is a pre-World War I phenomenon. Therefore, by the late '50s when artist David Smith executed his untilted abstract drawing, now owned by Spencer Museum, his interest in abstraction seemed almost mannered.
David Smith (1906-1965) primarily known as a sculptor, made the museum's drawing of oil, ink and tempera on paper in conjunction with a series of painted steel sculptures called "Menands," begun in 1962. The sculpture is in marble by Seth was par for the course as it had been in painting for decades. Now Smith was ingeniously coordinating the two media.
Smith's style is like that of his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists. Known as gestural painters, the work of these artists took on an almost calligraphic quality. Although in Smith's drawing there is some hint of the human figure, a circular "head" with triangular areas potentially serving eyes, most prevalent is not what is being presented but how it is being presented: the play of forms, one against the other and the gestural working of the paint's thickness. It is this feeling in painting that Smith adopted in his sculptures. We see, then, that not only is the phenomenon of abstraction something that is quite
old, but that it is something farreaching to all art forms.
Harry Bertioa's "Musical Sculpture," dated about 1668, employs welded bronze to convey the idea of abstraction expressed in three-dimensional form. The association of abstraction with music, a comparison Kandinsky in his book, becomes realized here. It is one of the few pieces the museum encourages you to touch so you can set in motion the hundreds of thin metal rods that comprise the piece. It produces random musical sounds, lovely and gentle, as though Bertioa understood Kandinsky when he wrote, "The historian will see that our ugliness was harmy." Plain "ugly" rods become artful sounds.
Kandinsky said that the historian would see that their work "was in no way the rejection of all previous kinds of harmony and beauty, but was their organic, immutable and natural continuation. So the new branch is the continuation of the same tree. And the leaf is of the same branch." There is little difference between Bierstadt's manipulation of human forms and Vogel's perfect-appearing world, and the manipulation by the abstract painters and sculptors to give form to inner expression to that same world. Both, it would seem, sought to delight the senses and to touch the soul.
Susan Baker is a Lawrence graduate teaching assistant in the art history department.
John Blum/SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
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