UNIT 6
It seemed inevitable that the avant-garde art of the beginning of the century should ultimately result in a painting devoid of any relationship with the external reality of objects, and hence an art no longer enslaved to visual experience. All the experiments carried out between 1900 and 1915 (from Symbolism onwards) converged upon that end, even if sometimes not in a completely clear and conscious way. With its interest in primitive styles and its search for a simplification of forms that would increase the work’s powers of engagement, Expressionism was proceeding towards a notion of the painting as a “field of dynamic tensions”, as a complex structure of forces and conflicts, freeing the pictorial result from any “banal” acceptance of the phenomena of the external world. Cubism too prepared the ground with a truly revolutionary conception of space, which ended by destroying the most important of the accepted formal practises, perspectival representation. The work of the Fauves, too, which appeared to celebrate the lightness of a carefree world by plunging the onlooker into a euphoria of colour, actually tended to point to the possibility in art of an independent, fully self-sufficient language.
Abstraction was not really a movement, since it developed in widely scattered parts of Europe and, for the most part, with its main exponents working in mutual independence. The first works where no imitative component was any longer recognizable were painted by Kandinsky from 1910-11 onwards. He was also the first painter explicitly to use the definition of “abstract art” for his own work. Kandinsky’s art is referred to by critics as “lyrical abstraction” in contrast with the geometric art of Malevich and Mondrian.
In 1915, at an exhibition which is regarded today as a turning point for the historical avant-garde, Malevich exhibited a painting of a black square on a white ground, with other paintings around it consisting of geometrical shapes in pure, brilliant colours, juxtaposed in corners of the canvas. This was the beginning of Suprematism, a pictorial movement, and above all a theory, which was soon to have many followers in Russia including Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova and El Lissitsky. For its founder, the work of painting was unshackled by any subjection to the real world: indeed it was a real event in itself and for itself; it was as “concrete” as all the other objects that surrounded it. Thus the “object – painting” did not imitate reality: it existed, just as natural objects exist.
Painting is only a construction of colours on a two-dimensional plane. It is obvious that Black Square on a White Ground makes no claim to demonstrate the skill of its author: it is an idea made concrete, a sort of introduction to the new painting, but also the “last” word on imitation in art. This picture proclaimed a painting that emphasized the importance of form as an independent intellectual entity. In fact, Suprematist Art presents spatial problems (relationships between forms, the ‘weight’ of the colour, internal movement) which are brilliantly resolved.
Basically, abstract painting does away with the Renaissance norm of the “transparency” of the painting and replaces it with a conception of the surface as dense and opaque, by virtue of which what “is seen” is only ever the surface itself, treated in various ways. Its language thus includes the “concrete” quality of the painting, its spatial proportions, stylistic assonances and dissonances, colour harmonies and clashes.
(A Guide to Art, 1992, pp. 173-185)