Abstraction in art is achieved by simplification of form or shape, the fusion of background and foreground as an integrated pattern, the emphasis of the picture plane and the arbitrary use of color and perspective. One of the reasons why modern artists are interested and influenced by children’s art is that children are natural abstractionists. By the time children become adolescents they usually dispense with world. Because of the restrictions that realism imposes and the inability of most students to draw with the skill of an adult, the interest in art flags. The re-introduction of the values and methods of abstraction are looked upon as being ‘kid stuff’ and it becomes the teacher’s task to convince the students that abstract art as practiced by ‘grown-ups’ is worthy of their consideration.
What this unit will try to do is give some simple exercises in abstraction and to interest students in the history of not only American artists but in the history and ideology of this country. The connection to and translation of nature into an affair of the heart and spirit is not exactly a universal trait. Throughout America’s history the link to nature as a spiritual guide has always been strong. Consequently trying through abstraction to capture the essential force and dynamics of nature will be an exercise in art and American culture.
III. THE CULTURAL BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN ART
The conditions that explain the difference between avant-garde art in America and Europe are imbedded in their respective cultural histories. The attitude toward social, political and artistic freedom, the differing attitudes towards nature, the selection of subject matter and treatment of subject matter, the recording of the artist’s sensibilities in any given work of art, are all a reflection of their cultural differences.
I want to concentrate primarily on the different attitudes towards nature. But in order to do so, something must be said about how the Americans and Europeans viewed their separate worlds around the turn of the century. The world of Europe and the world of America were separate and distinct entities. Although it is true that Americans traveled to Europe to soak up culture, they couldn’t appreciate at first hand the experience of being European. The American modernists couldn’t absorb the reasons behind the modern art movement; they could only be impressed with the breath of freedom that the new art held out for them.
“American artists were to use these strikins new forms for a number of years, they still use them. The mistake has been that they have often adopted the means by which the French were attempting to cut a difficult knot without the perception of the strands of which it was composed—without a similar antecedent experience.” (Constance Rourke,
Charles Sheeler
).
While Europe was struggling with worn out values which had led to turmoil and revolution, pessimism and nihilism, America was enjoying a period of idealistic progressivism. Reformers of all sort were abroad in the land.
“Little as these people had in common, they were alike in seeing the nation, not as a place where everybody went his own way regardless of the plight of others, but as a place where people had a common destiny, where their fortunes were interlocked, and where wise planning, wise statesmanship could devise new instruments of satisfaction for all men.” (Frederick Lewis Allen,
The Big
Change, America Transforms
1900-1950.)
The period from 1900 to America’s entry into WW I was a time of reform. Active work in the social services became a more organized and respected calling. The Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation was formed and began to pour money into worthy causes. Henry Ford was designing a motor car that the lower middle classes could afford. John Muir the conservationist was crusading for the preservation of America’s natural resources. It was also a time of turmoil, but progressive turmoil. Women suffragettes were demanding the vote. The Socialist party was activity organizing unions and strikes for better working conditions, workmen’s compensation and higher wages.
America was optimistic. Problems that needed to be addressed were attended to, voices that were raised were listened to, if something wasn’t working right it could be fixed. In a nation of tinkerers anything could be mended and patched up. There was no need to throw it all away and throw up one’s hands in despair. Europe was going through similar eruptions of the status quo but the artistic and intellectual community turned their faces away, overwhelmed by the problems they saw before them.
America has had a history of change, and for many change meant better. The westward movement consisted of people packing up to start life over again, somewhere else, somewhere west, somewhere better. America was more flexible, less anxious about change. Goethe recognized one of the virtues of America when in a poem to America he congratulated this country for being free of the weight of history and tradition.
-
America, you’re better off than
-
Our Continent, the old.
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You have no castles which are fallen
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No basalt to behold.
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You’re not disturbed within your inmost being
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Right up till today’s daily life
-
By useless remembering
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And unrewarding strife.
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Use well the present and good luck to you
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And when your children begin writing poetry
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Let them guard well in all they do
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Against Knight-Robber-and Ghost Story.
-
(1827)
And Chateaubriand had the same reaction to the new country when he said, “Nothing is old in America but the trees, children of the soil, and liberty, the mother of all human society; these are worth as much as monuments and forebears.”
This air of progressivism, change, new social freedoms and the desire to make the nation a better place to live gave modern American artists the impetus and encouragement to pursue a change for the better in art. They were attempting to improve methods of communicating the values of nature, to reveal its deeper meaning by trying to paint the essence of force and power.
“ . . . .an immanent world spirit flows through nature’s forms, and that the creative artist, by his interaction with that spirit, also contributes to spiritual energy in the world.” (Hopkins,
Spires of Form,
A Study of Emerson’s Aesthetic
Theory
)
In Europe there was no sense of trying to ‘fix up the old jalopy’ to keep it running. The machine was felt to be beyond repair. To the intelligencia their world had come to an end and the only thing left to do was to destroy it utterly. In art that meant destroying the old traditional style of painting and with it all that was expected or understood to be painting: realism, perspective, the illusion of three dimension, the moral tone and sentiment embodied in a work of art. Modern artists set about the task of denying the world they knew.
“The artist deforms an object not in order to reveal it but to deny the normal and to disappoint expectations.”
“A first and key determination of such art is its negativity. It is anti-: anti-religion, anti-morality, anti-nature, and in the end even anti-art . . . . . . .The world and its values were rejected for the sake of freedom. Art became a weapon in the struggle against reality . . . . . . .To cast off this burden (reality) the artist tries to convince himself and others that the world is not worth having and has no rightful claim on man.” (Karsten Harries,
The Meaning
of Modern Art
).
The first line of Apollinaire’s Aesthetic Meditations, the cubist manifesto, reads “The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.” Nature is viewed in a curiously Victorian manner. It keeps man in bondage by delighting the senses, allowing man the false impression that he can control it. It intrigues man with its mystery. Nature is unstable, the present is fugitive, time is fleeting. Nature “ . . . strives to imprison us in that fatal order of things limiting us to the merely animal” and “The time has come for us to be the masters,” stated Apollinaire. And the way to subjugate nature in Apollinaire’s view, is to substitute pure geometric forms, forms that do not naturally occur in nature. Abstraction, the reduction of nature into “cone, sphere, and cylinder” (Cezanne), is the weapon to use against nature. Nature has become the euphemism for all that’s ailing in Europe.
The American artists, however, had a romantic view of nature. They were still very much influenced by the works of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“The knowledge of nature is most permanent . . . .. clouds and grass are older antiquities than pyramids or Athens; then they are most perfect” (Emerson, Journals, 111, 284).
Nature is an expanse of fleeting climates and unstable elements, but there is a wonderful permanency within that instability. Nature’s spiritual grandeur lies in its unrevealed mystery. Man is part of the “fatal order of things’ and he glories in it.
“If artistic creation gives the effect of flowing rather than freezing, of moving rather than standing still, it is proof that the artist has caught, not so much by imitation as by identity of inspiration, this energetic power which represents Nature’s creative ability.”
“ . . . .an immanent world spirit flows through nature’s forms, and that the creative artist, by his interaction with that spirit, also contributes to spiritual energy in the world” (Vivian Hopkins,
Spires
of Form, Aesthetic Theories of
Emerson
).
The dichotomy between the two views of nature is so obvious that the point needn’t be labored any further. What that difference represents to my mind however, is the reason why the art work of Europe and America before WWI looks so different from one another.
Today many of the perceptions and statements of the Cubists about the world have entered into the American language and culture as well and art now shares an international language.
MARIN
(figure available in print form)
15
Woolworth Building, No. 31
(1912)
John Marin 1870-1953
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey. Went to Paris 1905. Sketching trips to Italy, Belgium and Holland. Associated with Arthur B. Carles, Max Weber, Alfred Mauer in Paris, 1905-1910. Met Stieglitz 1909, first exhibit at gallery “291” 1910. First paintings indicative of his future style inspired by Tyrol Alps in Italy.
“Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms—Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain—and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. . . .”
Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century,
compl. and ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves.
HARTLEY
(figure available in print form)
Plate 14
Painting No. 48, Berlin, 1913 (cat. no. 19)
The Brooklyn Museum; The Dick S. Ramsay Fund
Marsden Hartley 1877-1943
Born in Lewiston, Maine. 1909 first showed at Stieglitz gallery “291”. Went abroad 1912. Influenced by Albert Pinkham Ryder, Cezanne and Picasso. 1914-15 in Germany start of WWI, influenced by Kandinsky and German expressionists. Paintings filled with German military symbols. Franz Marc invited him to exhibit in Der Blaue Reiter group 1915. Returned to live in Europe 1921 to 1930s.
“. . . I do not admire the irrationality of the imaginative life. I have made the complete return to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is, like nature an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye—and the eye is the painter’s first and last vehicle—are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter.” 1928
Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century
, compl. and ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves.
DOVE
(figure available in print form)
Team of Horses
. 1911. Pastel on linen, 18-1/2” x 21-1/2”. Mary B. Holt, M.D., Bay Shore, New York
Arthur G. Dove 1880-1946
Born in Canadaique, N.Y. First Paris trip, 1908. Influenced by the fauves. First exhibition at Stieglitz gallery “291”, 1910. Between 1911-1914, painted first abstractions indicative of his own future style.
“A few principles existed in all good art” “The choice of a simple motif. This same law held in nature, a few forms and a few colors sufficed for the creation of an object. The first step was to choose from nature a motif in color and with that motif to paint from nature, the forms still being objective.” The second step was to apply this same principle to form, the actual dependence upon the object (representation) disappearing, and the means of expression becoming partly subjective.”
Dove letter to Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionists, 1914, Appendix,
Arthur Dove
, by Barbara Haskell.
DEMUTH
(figure available in print form)
15.
End of the Parade
: Coatesville, Pa. (The Milltown), 1920
A poem by William Carlos Williams inspired by the painting “End of the Parade”
The sentence undulates
raising no song—
It is too old, the
words of it are falling
apart. Only percussion
strokes continue
with weakening
emphasis what was once
cadenced melody
full of sweet breath
Charles Demuth 1883-1935
Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. First Trip to Paris, 1907, again in 1912-1914. First exhibit in New York, 1915.
Demuth’s depiction of “those precious flowers known as smokestacks.”
Betsy Fahlman, Pennsylvania Modern:
Charles Demuth of Lancaster
.
SHEELER
(figure available in print form)
11 Church Street “El.” 1922. Oil on canvas, 15-1/2 x 18-1/2 inches.
Charles Sheeler 1883-1965
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Several trips to Europe between 1904 and 1909. Early works have a strong Cezanne influence. Took up photography 1912.
“I venture to define art as the perception through our sensibilities, more or less guided by intellect, of universal order and its expression in terms more directly appealing to some particular phase of our sensibilities . . .” “One-, two-, and three-dimensional space, color, light and dark, dynamic power, gravitation or magnetic forces, the frictional resistance of surfaces and their absorptive qualities, all qualities capable of visual communication, are material for the plastic artist, and he is free to use as many or as few as the moment concern him. To oppose or relate these so as to communicate his sensations of some particular manifestations of cosmic order—this I believe to be the business of the artist.”
Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century
, compl. and ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves.
O’KEEFFE
(figure available in print form)
From the Plains,
1919, oil on canvas, 27-7/8” x 23-5/8”
Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986
Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. First important works 1915, a series of abstractions in charcoal of natural forms. First solo show at the Stieglitz gallery, 1917. She admired and was partially influenced by the work of Arthur Dove.
“There are people who have made me see shapes—and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who made me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions—no one seeing what they are.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
by Georgia O’Keeffe, Studio Book, Viking Press.