What Abstract Art Means to Me
Author(s): George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert
Motherwell, Stuart Davis
Source: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, What Abstract Art Means
to Me (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250
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MORRIS: Suspended Discs. 1950. Oil, 23 x 19'. The Downtown GaUery.
WHAT ABSTRACTART MEANS TO ME
On the evening of Februaryfifth, 1951, the Museum of Modern Art presented a symposium on
Abstract Art in connection with the exhibition then current in the llIuseum, Abstract Painting
and Sculpture in America. Organizedby a committeeof the Junior Council, with Mrs. Mathew
T. Mellon as chairman, and Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Director of the Department of Painting
and Sculpture, acting as Moderator, this meeting aroused wide public interest and broughtforth
many requestsfor publication of thepapers by the six artist speakers. The latter were asked to
give their views on theproposition: "What AbstractArt Means to Ale." Their statementsfollow,
in the order in which they were read.
GEORGE L. K. MORRIS
Somehow it doesn't seem long since I trudged in a
picket-line; in the street here, and in the rain. A
fairly muted demonstration against the Museum,
which wasn't always in a mood for showing abstract
paintings by Americans. It was fun I suppose-needless
to say, the picketing produced no
results. Yet a majority of the picketers are visible
through their works at the moment, upstairs on
the third floor,whereit's warm and out of the rain.
However, this is no time to celebrate in fact it's
better if artists never celebrate. New abstract
picket-lines are doubtless assembling, to protest
the former picketers.
And I hope they are. It has been our contention
from the start that the problems of abstract art
can be hacked at from countless points of view.
And it takes fanatics (in art as in history) to establish
sound precepts. Our problems may not be
new to art, but the conception of an abstract picture
as we know it, certainly is. Can you imagine
it in any other time - an artist just putting
shapes together-shapes that represent nothing,
either alone or in combination? He puts a frame
around it, and offersit on the open market, just as
a good thing to have around and look at; something
that will speak to you as an independent
personality, and yet is very quiet.
No one has been offering art like this for very
long; just forty years, and fitfully at that. Painters
are only beginning to anticipate what happens to
forms in design under given circumstances. Not
much can be taken for granted, no art can ever accommodate
rules; and there is plenty of room still
to push and pull at the problems.
New possibilities for liberation-now we come
to the sourcesof salvation or disaster. To free one's
emotions that's necessary, but it isn't very much
in itself. Any one can find a way for that, and it
certainly takes much more to produce life that will
endure up on a wall. I have found in the long run
that it's a counter-force, the effort of control and
pacification, that releases character. It's this
harnessing of freedom that has endowed great
paintings with a poise and distinction to move us
still after centuries. There lies a danger, always
threatening, that the artist's sense of freedom will
lead to false assumptions, that his own personality
-seemingly so precious and unfettered-may be
3
more important than the thing he is after. The
demands for controlling forces-those that will fit
the emotional gamut exactly, moreover--are all
too easily submerged.
Whistler's observation has been often quoted,that
an artist who paints Nature withoult a high
degree of selection is like a "pianist who sits on the
keyboard." Had Whistler been familiar with abstract
art, he might have cautioned further against
someone who "sits on his palette." If a painter
should sit on the palette he'd probably produce
something strong and brutal there might even be
a suggestion of agony. But can an artist thus
found a base of operations on which to build a
changing world and when the shock is over, how
will it strike the eye in repose? Anyway, it should
never be uniqueness we are after, but the basis of
style.
This brings me to a second aspect. No one ever
hated modern art more violently than our late
critic, Mr. Royal Cortissoz. Yet I will honor him
for a penetrating notation, which I frequently recall.
He once summed up a modern exhibition with
the outburst "This may be all very interesting, but
Oh, the looks of it!" He puts forward so memorably
a truth whlichcan never be over-stressed--
that painting is basically an optical experience.
(And by "looks of it" we must hang on to ouirinstincts
for quality, and not false conceptions of
appearance.) After this instantaneous effect, fine
pictures of course require long and repeated study
-but to a surprising degree the initial tell-tale
glance will carry through. And for abstract art this
test is merciless. There is no hiding from it through
subject-interest; conifusioncan cloud it for a moment,
but we are interested in something that will
last.
Much more could be said about the two ingredients
of abstract art-the emotional impulse and
the structural fabric that is essential to make it
credible. In primitive art the ability to fuse the
two is quite natural and appropriate. No wonder
the Cubists started from Negro sculpture-and
they themselves produced a unity that was welded
as tightly as a fist. How do we find this ourselves?
There is not much to follow beyond one's qualitative
sense. And now I am approachingthe territory
where words can hardly follow. Taste and quality
are as difficult to trace consciously as to delineate
the exact points of superiority between a rare vintage-wine
and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Yet it is a
sense of quality which governs entirely the two
points I have been stressing. One false note in an
abstract picture can turn vintage-wine into a nasty
medicine, and we must be ever alert for the taste.
Moreover there are no rules for drawing the boundaries.
Still, I will close with a generalization--
that art produces two opposing forces, like the intake
and outlet of the breath; it takes one individual
impulse to activate a painting with lifethe
second fastens it with control, and makes possible
a firmeractivity toward the niextcreation.
WILLEM DE KOONING
The first inan who began to speak, whoever he
was, must have intended it. For surely it is talking
that has put "Art" into painting. Nothing is positive
about art except that it is a word. Right from
there to here all art became literary. We are not
yet living in a world where everything is selfevident.
It is very interesting to notice that a lot of
people who want to take the talking out of painting,
for instance, do nothing else but talk about it.
That is no contradiction, however. The art in it is
the forever nmutepart you can talk about forever.
For me, only one point comes into my field of
vision. This narrow, biased point gets very clear
sonmetimes.I didn't invent it. It was already here.
Everything that passes me I can see only a little of,
but I am always looking. And I see an awful lot
sometimes.
The word "abstract" comes from the lighttower
of the philosophers, and it seems to be one of
their spotlights that they have particularly focussed
on "Art." So the artist is always lighted up
by it. As soon as it-I mean the "abstract"comes
into painting, it ceases to be what it is as it
is written. It changes into a feeling which could be
explained by some other words, probably. But one
day, some painter used "Abstraction" as a title for
one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a
very tricky title. And it wasn't really a very good
4
one. From then on the idea of abstraction became
something extra. Immediately it gave some people
the idea that they could free art from itself. Until
then, Art meant everything that was in it-not
what you could take out of it. There was only one
thing you could take out of it sometime when you
were in the right mood-that abstract and indefinable
sensation, the esthetic part-and still leave
it where it was. For the painter to come to the
"abstract" or the "nothing," he needed many
things. Those things were always things in life-a
horse, a flower, a milkmaid, the light in a room
through a window made of diamond shapes maybe,
tables, chairs, and so forth. The painter, it is
true, was not always completely free. The things
were not always of his own choice, but because of
that he often got some new ideas. Some painters
liked to paint things already chosen by others, and
after being abstract about them, were called
Classicists. Others wanted to select the things
themselves and, after being abstract about them,
were called Romanticists. Of course, they got
mixed up with one another a lot too. Anyhow, at
that time, they were not abstract about something
which was already abstract. They freed the shapes,
the light, the color, the space, by putting them into
concrete things in a given situation. They did
think about the possibility that the things-the
horse, the chair, the man-were abstractions, but
they let that go, because if they kept thinking
about it, they would have been led to give up
painting altogether, and would probably have ended
up in the philosopher's tower. When they got
those strange, deep ideas, they got rid of them by
painting a particular smile on one of the faces in
the picture they were working on.
DE KOONING: The Mail Box. (1948). Oil on paper, 23?s x 30". Coil Nelson A. Rockefeller.
M,-51~~~~~~~~~~~~
The esthetics of painting were always in a state
of development parallel to the development of
painting itself. They influenced each other and
vice versa. But all of a sudden, in that famous turn
of the century, a few people thought they could
take the bull by the horns and invent an esthetic
beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with
each other, they began to form all kinidsof groups,
each with the idea of freeingart, and each demanding
that you should obey them. Most of these
theories have finally dwindled away into politics
or strange forms of spiritualism. The question, as
they saw it, was not so much what you couldpaint
but rather what you could not paint. You could
not paint a house or a tree or a mnountain.It was
then that subject matter came into existence as
something you ought not to have.
In the old days, when artists were very much
wanted, if they got to thinking about their usefulness
in the world, it could only lead them to believe
that painting was too worldly an occupation and
some of them went to church instead or stood in
front of it and begged. So what was considered too
worldly froma spiritualpoint of view then, became
later-for those who were inventing the new esthetics-a
spiritual smoke-screen and not worldly
enough. These latter-day artists were bothered by
their apparent uselessness. Nobody really seemed
to pay any attention to them. And they did not
trust that freedom of indifference.They knew that
they were relatively freer than ever before because
of that indifference,but in spite of all their talking
about freeing art, they really didn't mean it that
way. Freedom to them meant to be useful in
society. And that is really a wonderful idea. To
achieve that, they didn't need things like tables
and chairs or a horse. They needed ideas instead,
social ideas, to make their objects with, their constructions
the "pureplastic phenomena"-which
were used to illustrate their convictions. Their
point was that until they came along with their
theories, Man's own form in space-his bodywas
a private prison; and that it was because of
this imprisoning misery-because he was hungry
and overworked and went to a horrid place called
home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached
and his head was heavy-because of this very consciousness
of his own body, this sense of pathos,
they suggest, he was overcome by the drama of a
crucifixionin a painting or the lyricism of a group
of people sitting quietly around a table drinking
wine. In other words, these estheticians proposed
that people had up to now understood painting in
terms of their own private misery. Their own sentiment
of form instead was one of comfort. The
beauty of comfort. The great curve of a bridge was
beautiful because people could go across the river
in comfort. To compose with curves like that, and
angles, and make works of art with them could
only make people happy, they maintained, for the
only association was one of comfort. That millions
of people have died in war since then, because of
that idea of comfort, is something else.
This pure form of comfort became the comfort
of "'pureform." The "nothing" part in a painting
until then the part that was niotpainted but that
was there because of the things in the picture
which werepainted-had a lot of descriptive labels
attached to it like "'beauty," "lyric," "'form,"
"'profound, "space, ttexpression, "classic,
"feeling," ""epic,""romantic," "epure," "balance,"
etc. Anyhow that "nothing" which was always
recognized as a particular something-and as
something particular-they generalized, with their
book-keepingminds, into circles and squares.They
had the innocent idea that the "something" existed
"in spite of" and not "because of" and that
this something was the only thing that truly mattered.
They had hold of it, they thought, once and
for all. But this idea made them go backward in
spite of the fact that they wanted to go forward.
That "something" which was not measurable,
they lost by trying to make it measurable; and
thus all the old words which, according to their
ideas, ought to be done away with got into art
again: pure, supreme, balance, sensitivity, etc.
Kandinsky understood ""Form"as a form, like
an object in the real world; and an object, he said,
was a narrative-and so, of course, he disapproved
of it. He wanted his "music without words." He
wanted to be "'simpleas a child." He intended,
with his "'inner-self," to rid himself of "philosophical
barricades"(he sat down and wrote something
about all this). But in turn his own writing
has become a philosophical barricade,even if it is a
barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of MiddleEuropean
idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something
too theosophic for me.
The sentiment of the Futurists was simpler. No
space. Everything ought to keep on going! That's
6
probably the reasoii they went themselves. Either
a man was a machine or else a sacrifice to make
machines with.
The moral attitude of Neo-Plasticism is very
much like that of Constructivism, except that the
Constructivists wanted to bring things out in the
open and the Neo-Plasticists didn't want anything
left over.
I lhavelearned a lot from all of them and they
have confused me plenty too. One thing is certain,
they didn't give me my natural aptitude for drawing.
I am completely weary of their ideas now.
The only way I still think of these ideas is in
terms of the individual artists who came from
them or invented them. I still think that Boccioni
was a great artist and a passionate man. I like
Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Tatlin and Gabo; and I
admire some of Kandinsky's painting very much.
But Mondrian, that great merciless artist, is the
only one who had nothing left over.
The point they all had in common was to be
both inside and outside at the same time. A new
kind of likeness! The likeness of the group instinct.
All that it has produced is more glass and an hysteria
for new materials which you can look
throuigh.A sympton of love-sickness, I guess. For
me, to be inside and outside is to be in an unlieated
studio with broken winldowsin the winter, or -taking
a nap on somebody's porch in the summer.
Spiritually I am wherever my spirit allows me to
be, and that is not necessarily in the future. I have
no nostalgia, however. If I ain confronted witlhone
of those small Mesopotamian figures, I have no
nostalgia for it but, instead, I may get into a state
of anxiety. Art never seems to make me peaceful
or pure. I alwavs seem to be wrapped in the melodrama
of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or
outside-or of art in general---as a situation of
comfort. I know there is a terrificidea there somewhere,
but whenever I want to get into it, I get a
feeling of apathy and want to lie down and go to
sleep. Some painters, including myself, do not
care what chair they are sitting on. It does not
even have to be a comfortable one. They are too
nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They
do not want to "sit in style." Rather, they have
found that painting--any kind of painting, any
style of painting-to be painting at all, in fact-is
a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak.
That is where the form of it lies. It is exactly in its
uselessness that it is free. Those artists do not want
to conform. They only want to be inspired.
The group instinct could be a good idea, but
there is always some little dictator who wants to
make his instinct the grouipinstinct. There is no
style of painting now. There are as many naturalists
among the abstract painters as there are abstract
painters in the so-called subject-matter
school.
The argument often used that science is really
abstract, and that painting could be like music
and, for this reason, that you cannot paint a man
leaning against a lamp-post, is utterly ridiculous.
That space of science-the space of the physicists
-I am truly boredwith by now. Their lenses areso
thick that seen through them, the space gets more
and more melancholy. There seems to be no end to
the misery of the scientists' space. All that it contains
is billions and billions of hunks of matter,
hot or cold, floating arouindin darkness according
to a great design of aimlessness. The stars I think
about, if I could fly, I could reach in a few oldfashioned
days. But physicists' stars I use as buttons,
buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I
stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and
wonder where my fingersare-that is all the space
I need as a painter.
Today, some people think that the light of the
atom bomb will change the concept of painting
once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the
light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant,
everybody was the same color. It made angels out
of everybody. A truly Christian light, painful but
forgiving.
Personally, I do not need a movement. What
was given to me, I take for granted. Of all movements,
I like Cubism most. It had that wonderful
unsure atmosphere of reflection-a poetic frame
where something could be possible, where an artist
could practise his intuition. It didn't want to get
rid of what went before. Instead it added something
to it. The parts that I can appreciate in
other movements came out of Cubism. Cubism
becamea movement, it didn't set out to be one. It
has force in it, but it was no "force-movement."
And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel
Duchamp-for me a truly modern movement
because it implies that each artist can do what he
thinks he ought to-a movement for each person
and open for everybody.
7
If I dopaint abstract art, that's what abstract
art means to me. I frankly do not understand the
question. About twen-ty-fouryears ago, I knew a
man in Hoboken, a Germanwho used to visit us in
the Dutch Seamen's Home. As far as he could remember,
he was always hungry in Europe. He
found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a
few days old-all kinds of bread: French bread,
German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek
bread, American bread and particularly Russian
black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very
little money, and let it get good and hard and then
he crumpled it and spread it on the floorin his flat
and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of
him, but found out many years later that one of
the other fellows met him again around86th street.
He had become some kind of a Jugend Bund leader
and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays.
He is still alive but quite old and is now a
Communist. I could never figurehim out, but now
when I think of him, all that I can remember is
that he had a very abstract look on his face.
ALEXANDER CALDER
My entrance into the field of abstract art came
about as the result of a visi-tto the studio of Piet
Mondrian in Paris in 1930.
I was particularly impressed by some rectangles
of colorhe had tacked on his wall in a pattern after
his nature.
I told him I would like to make them oscillatehe
objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly-but
in two weeks I was back again
among plastic materials.
I think that at that time and practically ever
since, the underlying sense of form in my work has
been the system of the Universe, or part thereof.
For that is a rather large model to work from.
What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies
floating in space, of different sizes and densities,
perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and
surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous
condition, and some at rest, while others move in
peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of
form.
I would have them deployed, some nearer together
and some at immense distances.
And great disparity among all the qualities of
these bodies, and their motions as well.
A verv exciting moment for me was at the planetarium-when
the machine was run fast for the
purpose of explaining its operation: a planet
moved along a straight line, then suddenly made a
complete loop of 3600 off to one side, and then
went off in a straight line in its original direction.
I have chiefly limited myself to the use of black
and white as being the most disparate colors. Red
is the color most opposed to both of these and
then, finally, the other primaries. The secondary
colors and intermediate shades serve only to confuse
and muddle the distinctness and clarity.
When I have used spheres and discs, I have intended
that they should representmore than what
they just are. More or less as the earth is a sphere,
but also has some miles of gas about it, volcanoes
upon it, and the moon making circles around it,
and as the sun is a sphere-but also is a source of
intense heat, the effect of which is felt at great distances.
A ball of wood or a disc of metal is rather a
dull object without this sense of something emanating
from it.
When I use two circles of wire intersecting at
right angles, this to me is a sphere-and when I
use two or more sheets of metal cut into shapes
and mounted at angles to each other, I feel that
there is a solid form, perhaps concave, perhaps
convex, filling in the dihedral angles between them.
I do not have a definite idea of what this would
be like, I merely sense it and occupy myself with
the shapes one actually sees.
Then there is the idea of an object floating-not
supported-the use of a very long thread, or a long
arm in cantilever as a means of support seems to
best approximate this freedom from the earth.
Thus what I produce is not precisely what I have
in rmind but a sort of sketch, a man-made approx-
imation.
That others grasp what I have in mind seems
unessential, at least as long as they have something
else in theirs.
8
CALDER: Hanging Mobile. 1936. Aluminum, steel wire. Ca. 28' wide. Coil. Mrs. Meric Callery.
Still (upper left) and in motion.
9
FRITZ GLARNER
A painter should never speak because words are
not the means at his command. Words cannot express
visually dimension at a glance they can
only establish their own relationship in time.
However, it is possible for a painter, at certain
moments of his development to formulate some of
the problems he is facing in the growth of his
work. A painting cannot be explained. Words can
only stimulate the act of looking.
A visual problem is never put a priori as a mathematical
problem but is born in the process of
painting and evolves in a state of unawareness of
the painter.
Throughout my search for the establishment of
essential values, throughout my struggle to free
my painting from the naturalistic, I was impelled
little by little to dematerialize the object, eliminating
all that appeared to me as superficiality, reducing
it to an appearanceno longer specific-to a
form symbol. When the motive for the formsymbol
can no longer be identified by the spectator,
a degree of abstraction has beeinobtained.
To liberate form, it is necessary for the formsymbol
to lose its particularity and become similar
to space. To liberate form it is necessary to determine
space so that their structures become
identical. When the form area and the space area
are of the same structure, a new aspect arises in
which pure means can reveal their intrinsic expression.
The differentiation between form and
space has to be established by color, proportion,
oppositions, etc. Color, pure color, no longer assigned
to dress up a particular form-symbol is free
to act by its own true identity. It is my belief that
the truth will manifest itself more clearly through
this new condition.
Man can only free himself by a process of give
and take. In painting form has to lose its specific
identity and space has to acquire one by determination.
To express life-its duality, its pulsations,
its rhythms, its exact recurrences---theartist of our
age should find through his own development the
sensitive point of balance between the subjective
and the objective expression.
10
....... ........~
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GLARNER RelationalPainting 1950 04,58 x 48' RoseFned Gallevy.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
..1....
ROBERT MOTHERWELL
The emergence of abstract art is one sign that
there are still men able to assert feeling in the
world. Men who know how to respect and follow
their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or
absurd they may first appear. From their perspective,
it is the social world that tends to appear
irrational and absurd. It is sometimes forgotten
how much wit there is in certain works of abstract
art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish
where one encounters the comic I think of Miro,
of the late Paul Klee, of Charlie Chaplin, of what
healthy and human values their wit displays. . .
I find it sympathetic that Parisian painters
have taken over the word "poetry," in speaking
of what they value in painting. But in the Englishspeaking
world there is an implication of "literary
content," if one speaks of a painting as having
"real poetry." Yet the alternative word, "esthetic,"
does not satisfy me. It calls up in my mind
those dull classrooms and books when I was a
student of philosophy and the nature of the esthetic
was a course given in the philosophy department
of every university. I think now that there is
no such thing as the "esthetic," no more than
there is any such thing as "art," that each period
and place has its own art and its esthetic which
are specific applications of a more general set of
human values, with emphases and rejections corresponding
to the basic needs and desires of a particular
place and time. I think that abstract art is
uniquely modern-not in the sense that word is
sometimes used, to mean that our art has ""progressed"
over the art of the past; though abstract
art may indeed represent an emergent level of
evolution-but in the sense that abstract art
represents the particular accep-tances and rejections
of men living under the conditions of inodern
times. If I were asked to generalize about this condition
as it has been manifest in poets, painters,
and composers during the last century and a half,
1 should say that it is a fundamentally romantic
responseto modernlife-rebellious, individualistic,
unconventional, sensitive, irritable. I sho-uldsay
that this attitude arosefrom a feeling of being ill at
ease in the universe, so to speak the collapse of
relig,ion, of the old close-knit community and
family may have something to do with the origins
of the feeling. I do not know.
But whatever the source of this sense of being
unwedded to the uiiiverse, I think that one's art is
just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to
unify oneself through union. Sometimes I have an
imaginary picture in mind of the poet Mallarme in
his study late at night changing, blotting, transferring,
transforming each word and its relations
with such care-and I think that the sustained
energy for that travail must have come from the
secret knowledge that each word was a link in the
chain that he was forging to bind himself to the
universe; and so with other poets, composers and
painters . . . If this suggestion is true, then modern
art has a different face from the art of the past
because it has a somewhat different function for
the artist in our time. I suppose that the art of far
more ancient and "simple" artists expressed something
quite different, a feeling of already being at
one wi-ththe world...
One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's
appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.
How many rejections on the part of her artists!
Whole worlds-the world of objects, the world
of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes,
the world of fetishes and ancestor worship. One
might almost legitimately receive the impression
that abstract artists don't like anything but the
act of painting. . .
What new kind of mystique is this, one might
ask. For make no mistake, abstract art is a form
of mysticism.
S-till,this is not to describe the situation very,
subtly. To leave out consideration of what is being
put into the painting, I mean. One might truthfully
say that abstract art is stripped bare of other
things in order to intensify it, its rhythms, spatial
intervals, and color structure. Abstraction is a
process of emphasis, and emphasis vivifies life, as
A. N. Whitehead said.
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art
could have come into existence, save as the consequence
of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable
need.
The need is for felt experience-intense, immediate,
direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid,
rhythmic.
Everything that might dilute the experience is
stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is
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........
I ..-.
MOTHERWELL:Personage.1943. Oil, 48 x 38". NortonGalleryand Schoolof Art.
that of any mode of thought. Abstract Art is a
true mysticism-I dislike the word-or rather a
series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical
circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary
sense of gulf, an abyss, a void between one's
lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort
to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction
is its emphasis.
Perhaps I have tried to be clear about things that
are not so very clear, and have not been clear
about what is clear, namely, that I love painting
the way one loves the body of woman, that if
painting must have an intellectual and social
background, it is only to enhance and make more
rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for
which everyone has a need. ..
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DA VIS: Hot Still-Scape for Sixc Colors. 1940. Oil on canvas, 36 x 45ff* Coil. Jan de Graa.ff.
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STUART DAVIS
I think of Abstract Art in the same way I think of
all Art, Past and Present. I see it as divided into
two Major categories, Objective and Subjective.
Objective Art is Absolute Art. Subjective Art is
Illustration, or communication by Symbols, Replicas,
and Oblique Emotional Passes. They are
both Art, but their Content has no Identity. Their
difference cannot be defined as a difference of
Idiom, because all Paintings have the Laws of Design
as a common denominator. Design exists as an
Idiom of Color-Space Logic, and it also exists in an
Idiom of Representational Likenesses. Objective
Art and Subjective Art exist in both Idioms. Their
differencecan only be defined in terms of what the
Artist thinks his Purpose means-its Content as a
Design Image.
Objective Art sees the Percept of the Real World
as an Immediate Given Event, without any Abstract
Term in it. But there is Consciousness of
Chanige, of Motion, in it. The Real Object, its
Image in the Idiom of Idea, and the external
Image of Idea as Design, are experienced as a simultaneous
event in Consciousness. These three
distinct realities are Perceived as a single Object;
a Headline on the Display-Surface of Common
Sense. The consciousness of change experienced in
these separate identifications is understood as the
Total Form of this Object. To know this is the
experience of its Free Accomplishment; an act
amenable to Volition. This is the Total Appearance,
hence Total Content of Objective Art, Absolute
Art. Its Universal Principle is the Sense of
Freedom.
Subjective Art is a 'Horse of Another Color,' to
use the current Bop phrase; as it refers to shots of
'Horse,' or Heroin, which come in different colors
to suit the Esthetic Taste and Poetic Mood of the
client. Taste and Mood are well-known attributes
of Subjective Art, inherent in its concept of Reality.
Unlike Objective Art it sees the Change between
the Real Object, the Idea Object, and Real
Design, as an Abyss, a Chasm, a Void. These terms
appear frequently in its literature, and often as
Holes in the Paintings. Its concept of Universal
Principle has no Objective continuity. Spanning
the Gaps in it is accomplished in an emotional
Context of Anxiety, Fear, and Awe. That is how
Subjective Art was born. Its Universal Principle
has more the character of a Universal Bellyache.
The Security Image of Objective Art is in the
Familiar Likeness of Change as a Topical Subject.
But the Security Image of Subjective Art has a
hypothetical location somewherein Tibet. As a result
it has become the greatest builder of Arachnoid
Bridges in the world. Like the Laminated
Iconography of the Scholars, it has a Perverse
Passion for the Detour. It Eschews Route 66, and
has a million brokenbones to themile. Over30 years
ago, Learned Proponents for Expressionism variously
identified its Content as a "Psychic Discharge";
"Soul-Substance"; and a "Belch from the
Unconscious," communicating the Distress of the
SufferingArtist, as a sort of Moral Cathartic.
My interest in Art does not arise from this kind
of Distraction, which still has a number of Fans.
Art is not a Subjective Expression to me, whether
it be called Dadaism, Surrealism, Non-Objectivism,
Abstractionism, orIntra-Subjectivism. But
when paintings live up to these Advance Agent
Press Releases, I turn on the Ball Game.
Fortunately any similarity between the Painting
and the Publicity is purely coincidental in many
cases. In such a number of cases, in fact, that
Modern Art as a whole is not more subjectively expressionistic
in character than the most Durable
Remains of Past Art. So-called Abstract Art to me
is an Idiom of Color-SpaceLogic as the Design of a
Topical Subject, understood as the Universal Free
Subject. In that understanding there is No Abstract
term. My intention is to keep it that way.
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