The Beginnings of Abstract Art
by John O’Neil
1945 (?)
Modern art in all countries is essentially French. All the movements, great or small have originated in France. France is like a great central fire sending sparks all over the world which fall on a variety of fuel and burn with varying force and character.
Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem. Artists of the 15th century were moved by a passion for imitating nature. In the North, the Flemings mastered appearance by the meticulous observation of external detail. In Italy, the Florentines discovered the laws of perspective, of foreshortening, anatomy, movement and relief.
In the early 20th century in France, the dominant interest was exactly opposite. The pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed and refined many times. The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts. By a common and powerful impulse they were driven to abandon the imitation of natural appearance.
The beginnings of abstract art were brought about by the 20th Century reaction from the 19th Century formula:
1st, that art is imitation, that one must look primarily for likeness to a model in nature.
2nd, that art must be “finished”, refined, a sort of technical display.
These were the idols, the obsession of correct 19th Century painting and sculpture. But painters finally began to re-state the idea that art is primarily a creative activity on the part of the artist, and that it is one of the few ways in which divinity constantly reasserts itself…
“Abstract” is the term most frequently used to describe the more extreme effects of the present impulse away from “nature”. It is customary to apologize for the word “abstract” but words to describe art movements are often inexact. We no longer apologize for applying the ethnological word “Gothic” to French 13th Century art and the Portuguese word for an irregular pearl “Baroque” to European art of the 17th Century. Substitutes for “abstract” such as “non-objective” and “non-figurative” have been advocated as superior. But the image of a square is as much an “object” or a “figure” as the image of a face or landscape. (Editor’s note: of particular interest in regarding John O’Neil’s work).
This is not to deny that the adjective “abstract” is confusing and even paradoxical. For an “abstract” painting is really a most concrete thing since it confines the attention to its physical surface. The adjective is confusing, too, because it has the implications of both a verb and a noun. The verb to abstract means to draw out or away from. But the noun abstraction is something already drawn out or away from – so much so that it has no apparent relation to concrete reality.
Impressionism was the first movement that veered sharply away from former academic, photographic painting. It was essentially a scientific research into the optical laws governing color and concerned itself with representing transient effects of sunlight, shadow and atmosphere, with little or no concern for the architectural aspects of the picture. Post-Impressionism followed closely on its heels, fathered by Paul Cezanne, the real giant of modern French painting, who combined the high-keyed, luminous color of the Impressionist palette with a classical sense of form and space suggestion.
Soon after his death, Cezanne was deified as the new god of modern painting, and a single statement of his to the effect that “all forms in nature can be reduced to a cube, a cone, or a cylinder and anyone who can paint these forms can paint nature” was taken as the by-word of new groups of artists in Paris who were searching for new means of expression. Cubism was founded, and by its very nature, based upon the precepts of Cezanne, became the underlying mathematical structure of painting. The movement was an effort – and a most amazingly successful effort — to create pictures based on the concept that Architecture is the mother of the arts.
The fundamental idea of cubism is this: it is possible to dislocate the planes of an object seen and to re-arrange them in a picture so that they will give a truer emotional or structural sense than the original appearance. One sees an object from one side; it is an incomplete vision. A complete vision would show it not only as synthesized visually from all sides and aspects, but as it is from within.
Cubism creates an art, unrealistic in itself, but founded upon the contemplation of nature (and is thus related to all the best art productions of the Orient). It began as an attempt to produce a fusion between certain esthetic ideas which were discovered about the same time, and which have been pursued separately by different artists:
- The composition of space suggestion (Paul Cezanne, Andre Derain)
- The emotional quality of simplified form (African Negro Art)
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The central artist of the French school in the first quarter of the century has been Pablo Picasso. Picasso is a Spaniard, but he worked so continuously in Paris and is so closely identified with modern French production that historically he must be included in the French school. He is certainly one of the most interesting and significant artists now alive. His production has been enormous, he has never painted a dull picture or made a dull drawing; he never ceased to enlarge his experience; he has attacked incessantly problem after problem, he has never abandoned a half-solved problem, and he has never consented to repeat a success. His influence can be seen in paintings all over the civilized world.
Picasso began as a romantic painter in the so-called “Blue Period” and “Pink Period”. The pictures of this type when he was in his early twenties are very moving and poetical and definitely on the sentimental side. In 1907 he abandoned this romantic production, excluded everything charming from his work and sought to achieve a new classical style by studying the architectural aspects of Negro sculpture. In 1910, together with George Braque, Picasso invented Cubism which was a drastic force back of painting to the root character of architecture.
Though Picasso objects to the use of the word “research” in explaining his work, it nevertheless is descriptive of the plastic experiments he has been making in the past twenty-five years, and the results of these experiments have been a major force in the art world, although more in Europe than here. In fact the whole convention which we summarize by the word “modern” owes much of its genesis to the work done by Picasso and the findings of analytical cubism, which have left their mark on architecture, industrial design and commercial art, on furniture and textiles.
The audience of France allows much greater professional freedom in plastic arts, and Picasso’s range has been possible because of the willingness of Europeans to extend the métier of painting not only to include the use of a variety of media, but also to allow the painter to move about in related fields: book illustration, ballet décor, tapestry, murals and sculpture. More important than this even is the general tolerance toward experimentation. With us, once a painter has come up to a standard of excellence and once he has indicated his direction and receives his personal identification tag, he must be ready to show his tag on all occasions or run the risk of jeopardizing his professional standing.
(Filed in “O’Neil Writings 40s and 50s”; probably one of his first lectures.)