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Abstract Art: Its Origin, Nature, and Significance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Marcel Brion
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To define abstract art, which occupies such an important place in contemporary aesthetics, merely as a plastic mode of expression that makes no attempt to seek its own forms among those already existing in reality is to give a very inadequate notion of it. The term “non-figurative art,” which is sometimes used to describe it, arbitrarily restricts its range by stressing as peculiar to it this elementary fact alone and by characterizing abstract art solely as a controversial or even as a revolutionary art, as opposed to traditional aesthetics, which is itself figurative. Abstract art at times has also been called “concrete” or “non-objective” art. All these definitions have as little validity in themselves as those that are made use of in the history of art and are acceptable only at their “face value,” to use the monetary term, because they have no absolute value but merely a conventional one based on the principle of exchange (Baroque, Gothic, Rococo, Cubist). However, they are not to be ignored, since they do express the state of uncertainty, uneasiness, and indecision that afflicts most amateurs and even historians of art in regard to abstract art. At the same time, these definitions also indicate an awareness that we are dealing with a very important and complex phenomenon, enriched by extensive projections into the domain of social psychology, sociology, and probably even metaphysics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 6 , Issue 24 , December 1958 , pp. 42 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. Rouault was a great religious painter in spite of Fauvism, not because of it.

2. A long and complete account of abstract sculpture would require a special study.

3. Precedents exist today, in the sense that the most famous abstract painters are often imitated because of the success of their works. Thus, "schools" for their followers have already been established. These imitators take the line of least resistance and the road to material success which, chimerically, they consider an assured one for the sole reason that they are copying an "expensive painter."

4. This would require a "morphology of morphology" upon which, primordially, the entire history of valid art should be based.

5. A Suprematist composition, probably dating from 1918 and belonging to the Metro politan Museum of New York. The slope of the smaller square contained in the larger one represents a determination for motion which, in Malevitch, is always the manifestation of the mind.

6. I mean those of our contemporary period.

7. The German abstract painter Fritz Winter painted an entire series of gouaches in 1944 in a very short time. They were executed in a state of cosmic communion, and they are very representative of those shoots, whose germinations, those torrents of matter in a state of fusion, those explosions of buds, those mysterious growths of crystals, which the Natur philosophen as well as the pre-Socratics experienced. Significantly, Winter entitled this series of painting "Triebkräfte der Erde."

8. A great many critics, historians of art, and museum curators prove to be as incapable of knowing what abstract art really is as the unlettered masses might be. At least the latter are not previously ruined or immobilized by some arbitrary and incorrect notion about "taste."

9. To experience something is the faculty for erleben, for living with, or just living—a state. It is a total human experience, for which all of man's faculties are equally active and equally necessary: a total apprehension of the object seen by the viewer. The object con tinues to live within the spectator and acquires a new life, associating the personality of what is perceived with that of the perceiver, and thus creating a new personality each time.

10. Agam, for example.