[THEME MUSIC]
NARRATOR: For much of human history,
when people set out to make art they
did so by trying to represent things as they appeared
in the world around them.
And then about 100 years ago, a bunch of artists
stopped trying to do that.
It was shocking.
This is not what art was supposed to be or do.
And no one was given a compass really
for navigating this new art terrain, for interpreting it,
for appreciating it.
It's less shocking now, but it's still upsets and confounds.
How are we supposed to deal with an art completely untethered
from the world of recognizable objects?
And more importantly, why should we?
This is the case for abstraction.
It's important to note that we didn't just
dive headlong into complete abstraction in art.
JMW Turner's Seascapes, for example,
demonstrate that things that exist in the world
can often look abstract.
James McNeil Whistler's "Nocturne" show this too.
As do Victor Hugo's ink drawings.
But as the 19th century unfolded with the Industrial Revolution
and the invention of photography,
life in European and American cities changed dramatically.
And it should come as no surprise that representations
of that life changed too.
Artists were increasingly interested in depicting things
non-naturalistically.
Setting about abstracting things, i.e.,
starting with worldly subject matter
but stylizing it, simplifying it, flattening it.
By the 20th century, Matisse and Andre Derain
were painting familiar things, but in unfamiliar ways.
Using such intense colors in broad brush
strokes that a critic dubbed them the Fauvs or wild beasts.
Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist style,
painting much of the usual still life fodder,
but breaking it up into geometric shapes,
fragmenting the picture plane, and showing multiple sides
of a thing a once.
Cubism simultaneously revealed more than
what the eye could see, fusing multiple perspectives
and moments in time, while also drawing attention
to the flatness of the canvas itself.
The Italian Futurists wanted to reflect the speed
and over-simulation of modern urban life,
also collapsing space and time into one image.
German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
used abstraction and rich unreal colors
to depict the chaos and anxiety of the city street.
His contemporaries Franz Mark and Wassily Kandinsky
cited influences as diverse as tribal art
from Africa, medieval German woodcuts, Russian folk art, Art
Nouveau, and art by children.
But while Mark pursued abstraction
to connect with the natural world,
Kandinsky's interest was to commune with the spiritual.
He claimed his art was quote, "What the spectator lives
or feels while under the effect of the form and color
combinations of the picture."
For Kandinsky, abstraction was not opposed to Realism.
It was Realism.
I mean, there are real things that can't be seen, after all.
Emotion and consciousness are realities.
And maybe they could be painted too.
Kazimir Malevich called his brand
of abstraction Supremitism, saying his geometric elements
alone and in arrangements constituted
to zero a form beyond which laid the quote, "supremacy
of pure artistic feeling."
In the years leading up to World War I,
all these groups with names give the false impression
that what was happening was cohesive or organized.
It wasn't.
Abstraction did emerge through an international network
of artists who followed what each other we're doing.
But then again, we now know that Swedish painter Hilma af
Klint was painting mostly abstract works as early 1905.
She was part of a group called The Five who conducted seances
to communicate with spirits through pictures.
Klint's abstractions came from this interest in the spiritual
and occult as well as science, and the depiction
of invisible forces like recently discovered
electromagnetic fields, x-rays, and infrared light.
Theosophist Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater
had published images in 1901 they called Thought Forms.
Illustrating their belief that ideas, emotions, and sounds
manifest as visual auras.
Kandinsky and many others read this work
and also saw in music an important parallel,
an art form considered on its own terms
and freed from the burden of representing things
in the world.
Kandinsky liked Wagner and Schoenberg.
Paul Klee loved Bach.
Frantisek Kupka also drew a strong connection
between music and painting, believing
that without the distraction of subject matter,
art could act directly on the soul.
But Robert Delaunay was quote, "horrified" by music and noise
and said I never speak of mathematics
and never bother with spirit.
He was more concerned with the immediacy
and pictorial realities of color and contrast.
And his first disk was considered
the purest abstraction at the time.
His wife, Sonia Delauney, illustrated an influential book
of poetry, combining abstraction and typography,
a style she extended into painting
and later into fashion.
Piet Mondrian found his own way to abstraction,
translating his favorite subjects
like trees and architecture into gridded arrangements.
Spacial illusion is replaced by what Mondrian termed truth.
For him, everything could be processed
into horizontal and vertical lines,
revealing the structure of the world
through binary oppositions.
So abstraction was never monolithic.
In the traumatic years of World War I, artists like Paul Klee
can be seen as consciously turning away
from the material world.
Serving in the German army, Klee wrote in 1915,
"the more horrifying this world becomes,
the more art becomes abstract."
After the war, Klee and a number of abstract artists
taught at the Bauhaus School, founded in 1919
in Weimar, Germany.
It was organized around the principle
that the crafts were on equal footing with art.
And they sought to elevate the quality of life
through architecture and objects as well as art.
This focus on function as well as form
was also adopted by Theo von Doesburg and members
of the Dutch De Stijl group.
There was quote, "a new plastic art."
A simplified geometric style they
could serve as a universal aesthetic language
for everyday life.
Abstraction also found its way forward through explorations
of chance, with Dada artists Hans Arp, collaging squares he
dropped arbitrarily onto paper.
It wasn't all just painting and drawing either,
abstract sculpture took hold, for instance, in Russia,
with the work of Vladimir Tatlin and his professed truth
to materials before the war and Aleksandr Rodchenko after it.
Rodchenko exhibited three monochromatic paintings
in 1921, after which he wrote "It's all over.
There is to be no more representation."
He then denounced painting and fine art altogether,
and with the Productivists aimed to integrate art
into life, focusing on the design of posters and ads.
But of course, the enterprise of abstract painting
would continue to go on and on and on, and all
with different motivations.
There was El Lizzitzky, Marsden Hartley, Juan Miro,
Alexander Calder, Arshile Corky, and many others
in many parts of the world.
During World War II, many European artists fled to the US
and worked there, including Josef and Anni Albers, Fernand
Leger, Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Hans Hofmann,
Andre Masson, and Max Ernst, bringing new approaches
to Abstraction with them.
That influx of avant-garde thinking
is considered to be an important precondition for the success
of the abstract expressionists in New York in the 1940s
and '50s.
Many of those guys looked to ancient myths
and archaic cultures in search for timeless subject matter
and were influenced by Jungian psychology as well as jazz.
This largely improvisational approach
imparted a kind of directness and immediacy
meant to provoke strong emotional responses
through large scale and either dynamic gesture
or expansive fields of color.
The Gutai group in Japan also embraced the canvas as an arena
for action.
Kazou Shiraga even painting with his feet.
There was post painterly abstraction
with Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.
And hard edge abstract painting which
can be used to describe the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth
Noland, Felrath Hines, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt.
There was Op art, and of course Minimalism,
which seemed to boil down art to its most basic materials.
And then Post Minimalism, which emphasized
unconventional materials and the physical process of making.
There was Neo-expressionism in the 1980s, Conceptual
Abstraction in the '90s.
We're skipping over scads of important and interesting work
here.
But as we hurtle toward the present,
it becomes clear that abstraction
has been deployed by a wide range of artists
toward innumerable ends.
Abstraction is no longer an iconoclastic choice,
but it has nonetheless proved itself
to be a productive field for those who commit themselves
to it.
The most compelling abstract work being made today
often builds upon the traditions of the medium,
recycling and reinterpreting prior approaches
toward the creation of something new.
Abstraction can be used to think about technology,
its forms and functions.
And also the denial of technology through an emphasis
on tactility and physical presence.
It also continues to ask us what is the right and wrong way
to make art?
In what ways can we still intrigue the eye and mind?
There's a fair bit of grumbling today about how
the current inflated art market unfairly
privileges abstract painting.
But there's something important at play in that fact.
Much can be contained in abstraction.
It's not just one thing.
It can be a mirror or a window.
And it can shift depending on who is looking at it
and where and when.
It is done well and it is done poorly.
But the flexibility that makes it open to interpretation also
makes it market friendly and international.
When it's good, it rewards longer stints of looking.
It changes as you change.
But that expansiveness can also be frustrating, too wide.
But if we zoom out, we can see that many
of the core ways we have of interacting with the world
are abstract-- religion, markets, currency.
And humans have always liked abstractions.
We see abstract patterns way early on cave carvings
and as marks on pottery and textiles.
Geometric marks and forms have been with us all along,
often dismissed as decoration or relegated
to the world of craft.
This whole narrative is a farce if we consider how long
abstraction has been with us.
That it was not invented so much is discovered or accepted.
When looked at a different way, what's strange maybe the period
when humans did not embrace abstraction.