The terms realism and abstraction are often times used loosely in the art community. This happens to raise concerns and causes problems when discussing art in terms of the broad field of Modernism which encompassed many different periods and styles of artworks throughout the Western world. It is the intention of this essay to discuss the notions of realism and abstraction and how they relate to the movements and categories of art throughout Modernism. It may seem confusing to many readers that the explanations given in this essay for realism and abstraction are not what they had once considered them to be. This essay will discuss realism and abstraction using many different examples from a range of periods within Modernism to help further explain how the two often times mingling terms allow us to understand these particular movements. We will find, as we delve further into our discussion on realism and abstraction in Modernist art, that realism is mostly nonexistent within the popular art of the time period and abstraction is used in many different ways. Readers may also come to understand that realism within the period of Modern art may be a content interpreted through the art instead of the images that they are confronted with.
Fig. 1. Henri Matisse, The Dance. 1909-10. Oil on canvas, 260 x 391 cm.
Understanding realism and abstraction can often times be a difficult topic to grasp for some viewers of art. Oftentimes, viewers will look at a figurative painting by the French artist Henri Matisse and consider it to be a realistic picture, as it shows us figures that we can look at and immediately recognize as images of a human being. This is, however, not the case and in order to discuss Matisse’s work more thoroughly we can examine it by viewing his painting The Dance (1909-10). Upon our initial look at Matisse’s painting we see that it is a landscape consisting of five figures holding hands while organized in a circle. The figures, as we see them appear to be dancing. We immediately recognize these figures as human, but this does not mean that this is a realistic representation of five human figures. Jason Geiger addresses this painting by Matisse when he stated that “He shifts the focus of attention away from the depicted content towards the compositional structure of the picture itself.”[1] The figures in Matisse’s painting are most definitely abstract, which is evident by examining the physical characteristics of each figure in the painting. The first of these features is proportion, which in all five figures is contrary to the actual human form. The figures in Matisse’s painting all have elongated torso’s except for the one at the bottom and the one at the low right of the composition. They all have also been painted with elongated arms and legs, and their bodies, in some cases, are in positions that are contrary to actual human movement. An example of this would be the figure at the bottom of the composition who appears to nearly be in a position at a forty five degree angle to the surface it is standing on. Next, we can consider the color that Matisse utilized in his painting. Matisse’s figures are all an orange ocher color with an umber colored hair. The ground is a flat blue sky with a green surface to represent grass. We could say that Matisse has used for his painting a local color palette, but it’s important to recognize that his application of the color inherently flattens the figures and ground of his painting. Matisse has also outlined all of his figures in the umber color that he used in rendering their hair. These flat plains of color in combination with the outlines and lack of proportions all make the work abstract, but there is cause for this abstraction in Matisse’s painting. As Gaiger points out, “Rather than looking at the painting simply for its depicted content, we are asked to discover expressive qualities in the relations between its parts.”[2] Matisse’s distortions and color choices all lend this painting a natural and festive quality, one that appears almost celebratory.
Fig. 2. Edvard Munch, Anxiety. 1894. Oil on canvas, 94 x 73 cm.
In order to understand how abstraction functions within the realm of art we can look at a painting by Edvard Munch, Anxiety (1894), which evokes a content much different from that of Matisse’s painting. In Munch’s painting we see a line of figures standing on what appears to be a bridge over a landscape. The figures in Munch’s painting are, for the most part, drafted in a representational manner, at least those in the foreground of the painting. What is abstracted in Munch’s painting is the landscape, which is built up of lines of swirling color that give the painting an eerie quality, a “psychological intensity” due to “his willingness to reject naturalism in favour of a greater subjectivity.”[1] This coupled with Munch’s palette, one of complementary colors consisting of blues and oranges cause the painting to evoke, as the title suggest, anxiety in the viewer. We find ourselves in a similar situation in looking at German Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street Scene in Berlin (1913) which also provides us with figures that we can immediately recognize as human. What isn’t as recognizable in Kirchner’s composition is the landscape, as we are confronted with a space that is tight, shallow, and claustrophobic. Though Kirchner’s figures are noticed as such, they are at the same time abstracted in a disjointed manner as seen in the figure on the right with the cigarette whose head is nearly turned around to face the back of his body. All of these abstract elements in Kirchner’s painting are composed to create a feeling of tension and anxiety in the viewer and to express the anxiety of the age at the turn of the 20th century.
Fig. 3. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street Scene in Berlin. 1913. Oil on canvas, 121 x 95 cm.
Thus far in our discussion on realism and abstraction we have seen the ways in which abstraction is combined with representational elements to further the content of a specific work. To take this discourse a step further we can examine the ways in which abstraction is pushed to the limits, to a nearly unrecognizable image. For the purposes of this discussion we will focus our attention on one particular Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian whose work over the course of his career stretched from representational to fully abstracted and non-objective images.
Fig. 4. Piet Mondrian, Dune Sketch in Bright Stripes. 1909. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40
The first example of Mondrian’s work that I will analyze is Dune Sketch in Bright Stripes (1909). This painting, at first glance, appears to be a composition of horizontal lines in a complimentary color palette of violet and yellow. Upon further inspection we begin to realize that the horizontal bands that make up the predominantly horizontal composition resolve into an image which evokes a landscape. Understanding how this painting functions allows us to understand abstraction in art in general. Artists utilize abstraction in order to further the formal characteristic or content in their work. By designing his composition of horizontal bands of loosely handled paint on a horizontal format Mondrian further impacted the natural quality of his work and reinforces the image as a landscape.
Fig. 5. Piet Mondrian, Composition 10 in Black and White. 1951. Oil on canvas, 85 x 108 cm.
Mondrian developed his abstraction to a further extent with his painting Composition 10 in Black and White (1915). The imagery in this painting, from all appearances, has not been derived from anything in the known world. It appears to be a painting simply made up of horizontal and vertical lines. Mondrian however did conceive this painting from an actual experience in a real space even though that environment is not evoked in the painting as in Dune Sketch in Bright Stripes. Gaiger offered a description of this painting by stating that the differing qualities of the lines in the painting are representing the natural elements that Mondrian witnessed while he was painting an actual scene that existed while he was standing on a pier.[1] What we are seeing in this painting is the beginnings of a new genre of art, a furtherance of abstraction, known as non-objective art.
Fig. 6. Piet Mondrian, Composition in Line. 1916-17. Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 cm.
Mondrian’s work would quickly evolve into the realm of non-objective art with Composition in Line (1916-17). This painting by quick glance appears very similar to Composition 10 in Black and White, however, there is one extraordinary difference. Beyond the fact that the lines in the previous painting have been replaced by black rectangles the important shift in this work is that its image has not been extracted from nature.[1] Mondrian still utilizes all of the traditional elements and principles of making a work of art, but has created an image that has not been abstracted from anything… he has made an image that is completely non-objective. Another compelling element of Mondrian’s work is that even with the loss of reference to the natural world he was still able to maintain a quality of tranquility as he had evoked in his more representational work.
Fig. 7. Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red. 1958. Oil on canvas, 101 x 116 in.
This form of non-objective painting would continue in the United States during the 1940’s and 1950’s with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and Robert Motherwell would utilize non-objective painting to relay intense emotional content to their viewers. The term Abstract Expressionism is a problem in and of itself, one that is confusing, as the works made by the Abstract Expressionists were not abstractions at all, but as was previously stated completely non-objective. We can understand the expressive power of non-objective painting by looking at Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red (1958). This large scale painting consists of a red ground partially covered by four hazy masses of black and umber. Rothko hoped to utilize his compositions to reach his viewers on a higher spiritual level and one that expressed his personal and universal emotions.
Non-objective worked continued in the United States as the period of Abstract Expressionism began to dwindle. During this time of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s American painter Frank Stella created a series of paintings known as “The Black Paintings.” With this series of work Stella spearheaded the period commonly known as Minimalism which often times was seen as a revolt against the expressionism and drama of the Abstract Expressionists. What is most important about Stella’s work in this series is that he transformed the manner in which we can conceive of art being produced. In all of the works that we have considered thus far the traditional mode of thinking about composition has been used. Composition was commonly considered as designing an images by relational means, building one object off of another, and so on and so forth until the composition is complete. Stella rethought composition and instead of relational painting he utilized a method in which his painting became completely self-referential. Stella is known for at one time stating about his work, “What you see is what you see,” and this is true of his work as it has no basis in reality outside of itself.[1] Stella’s paintings were truly about his paintings and nothing more. We can find this by investigating Stella’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II (1959). Much like the other works in this series the painting is very large and consists of stripes of black industrial paint on unprimed canvas. Stella took a very mechanical approach to his application of paint in this series, each stroke of paint was applied in a width which matches the depth of his support and the stripes are separated by lines of raw canvas. These concentric stripes of paint were organized into different patterns which mimic the shape of the support on which they were painted. What made Stella’s paintings remarkable were that they were completely reactionary to representation, traditional compositional processes, and the emotional abstractions of the previous generation of painters.
Fig. 8. Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. Enamel on canvas, 90 x 132 in.
This essay has sought to better identify realism and abstraction as terms used to categorize art. What we have found through our investigation is that abstraction has taken on many different forms for several varying reasons throughout the period we have come to know as Modernism. Realism, as it seems, has played more of a role in the content of the works that we have seen, rather than in their appearance. An example of this would be how Kirchner relayed the tension and anxiety of his period to us through the content of his abstract paintings of cityscapes in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. We have seen that abstraction can come in varying degrees, such as the difference between Matisse’s painting and those of Mondrian. Non-objective artworks, often times misconstrued as a brand of abstraction has also been examined. We found that when utilized in the case of the Minimalist artists this non-objective work leaned more toward being a reaction against traditional art than any expression of an exterior content. We have surveyed paintings from many different periods within Modernism and have hopefully given a more fulfilling understanding of how realism and abstraction have functioned within these differentiating styles.
References
[1]. Jason Gaiger, “Expressionism and the Crisis of Subjectivity,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 44.
[2]. Jason Gaiger, “Expressionism and the Crisis of Subjectivity,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 45.
[3]. Jason Gaiger, “Expressionism and the Crisis of Subjectivity,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 29.
[4]. Paul Wood, “The Idea of an Abstract Art,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 251.
[5]. Paul Wood, “The Idea of an Abstract Art,” in Art of the Avant-Gardes, ed. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood, (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 253.
[6]. Bruce Glaser, “Frank Stella and Donald Judd,” in Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 121.