You won’t find a single representational image at the Guggenheim’s new exhibit on 20th century abstraction. This is not one of those gradual, one-toe-at-a-time-into-the-water kind of shows in which you see, step-by-step, how the artist got to the point of making all black canvases or amorphous squiggle-covered compositions. No violins peek out from fractured cubist space, no human form emerges, however vaguely, from slashing brush strokes.
“Suprematism (Black Cross on Red Oval),” by Kazimir Malevich
When they say abstraction they mean it.
In fact, just a few dozen feet up the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, you’ll find yourself face-to-canvas with Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting of a white square on a white background. There it is. The ultimate reductionist statement. What can possibly come next?
You have to surrender the idea of progress in art to appreciate this expansive show of 49 artists, all of whom have in common the idea that art should be as pure and as non-referential as music. Although the organization is chronological, abstraction is treated here as a tradition, not a revolution. That white square of Malevich’s, seemingly the end of something, was only the beginning for Robert Ryman, who, several decades and turns of the spiral later, devoted an entire career to variations of this white-on-white idea.
This is an ambitious show, but one that doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive. Picasso’s not even here, despite his pioneering role in cubism, apparently because he never really became a complete convert. He couldn’t shake the habit of painting people and things, however distorted.
The exhibit breaks down abstraction into several basic strategies — the monochromatic painting, the icon, the big color relationship, the spontaneous gesture, the geometric composition — and shows how all these ideas have been rediscovered by successive generations.
So, we can have Frank Stella saying in 1960, as if this were a novel concept rather than something laid down by the very founders of abstraction: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. What you see is what you get.”
Historically, artists have gravitated to abstraction for different reasons. In a Russian society ravaged by chaos, the constructivists used geometry and modern industrial materials as metaphors for order and stability. Dada used abstraction as a form of social protest, while the surrealists were interested in breaking through to another reality of dreams and the unconscious. The founders of abstraction – Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian – all believed in the spiritual quality of their work.
We get a taste of Italian futurism in Giacomo Balla’s “Abstract Speed and Sound,” with its sense of swirling movement, inspired, perhaps, by the revelations of Einsteinian physics. Robert Delaunay’s wonderful target-like composition is divided into quadrants in which the bands of colors are carefully modulated and juxtaposed to create a sense of vibration and expansion.
In Mondrian’s black-grid compositions, in which the lines enclose a few rectangles of color, we see what a risky game abstraction can be: If one reduces the whole process to just color and line – eschewing drama, pretty scenery, and lovely bodies – then one better be impeccable at manipulating the few variables left.
Jackson Pollock arrives on the spiral with a splash. His drip paintings have a swirling, manic energy that communicates directly to us, the way abstraction is supposed to. His prominent place on the main spiral seems to elevate him above contemporaries like de Kooning, or Arshile Gorky.
Rothko, too, has a big place on the ramp, and his paintings do make a nice counterpoint with Pollock’s. Where Pollock is all energy, like some kind of molecular explosion, Rothko is meditative stillness, a prolonged chord on the organ. These big, glowing horizontal bars of color project a mood that’s intensely religious or funereal.
In the work of Agnes Martin and some others, we get a sense that abstraction can become sterile, a dead end. Martin’s monochromatic paintings with their tiny graph-paper lines, seem absurdly minimal, mannered to the point of affectation. The same shift into self-consciousness can be seen in Frank Stella’s aggressive metal constructions that look like three-dimensional Pollocks.
The cycle of idealism to mannerism repeats itself throughout art history. Abstraction, today, is in the llatter phase. Still, it remains the most exciting artistic development of the 20th Century.
