Every artist had always been haunted by the urge to depict reality. At times subjective reality and at times objective reality. Subjective reality is the reality the artist perceives. And objective reality is the eternal truth regardless of the Artist’s viewpoint.
But in the hunt for reality, the artist must uncover the corporeal experience layer by layer. Every adjective, adverb, expletive prove to be a fabric of falsity guarding the truth behind.
It is more like a plastic smile on someone’s face that you feel is not real. Maybe someone with a flowing white beard is not actually a saint. It is possible that a person with great humor is deeply sad in reality. Once you peek behind his laughter, you discover a cloud of gloom. For better clarity, we can consider social media today. The prosperity and fanfare that many people claim to live through, in social media, are not real. We are aware of that. In fact, men often appear in classic photographs posing lovingly with their wives in traditional dresses. The little text proclaims a Romeo Juliet-like passionately unfailing bond lasting for couple of decades. If you are close to the man or the woman, you may discover that they curse each other all the time blaming that their lives had been ruined for being together. Well, by saying so, I do not mean that loving bonds do not exist. Of course they do. But in that case too, we may be misled by open squabbling of couples while they enjoy some blind attachment for each other.
Jokes apart, all that I described is unreal but visible and heard in daily life. The sensory inputs paint images, evidently far removed from reality. If we remove that plastic smile, the flowing white beard, the stage-managed photographs on social media and so on, we may end up with something we are totally unfamiliar with.
This is why, when an artist, in the pursuit of the real, keeps removing the layers of illusion or bluff from the world, what remains in the end is quite unrecognizable to our conventional eye.
And we end up reacting, ‘What on earth is this? Even my five-year-old could have done it.’ The fact is, the five-year-old indeed sees the truth much more clearly than a grown-up does.
This is why abstract expressionism was the extreme order of depiction of reality.
Now, let us go back to how it all started.
During Picasso days, cubism was at its Peak. Cubism overcame the limitation of a single viewpoint to depict an object. A multitude of viewpoints were employed to depict any object on canvas. This idea resonates with Mughal or Rajasthani paintings of ages ago.
But the new band of artists were not satisfied enough with cubism. They felt that the visual reality consisted of just patches of colour. A collage of patches of colour around us, make certain impressions on our senses. Motion too, they felt, was an outcome of overlapping strokes of colour. And Isac Newton’s colour theory came handy. Added to it was Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics. There began rigorous experiments with colour and its effect on our senses to find out how various combinations of colour tones in different shapes tickled our feelings.
Early abstract expressions were more of process driven images little to do with emotion. Artists like Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Stanton MacDonald came up with paintings with forms and shapes of various colours overlapping each other.
Then entered Wassily Kandinsky. Music inspired abstract images in his mind’s eye. Eventually, he documented the specific feelings invoked by various forms, shapes and colours on human mind through his book, The spiritual in art.
At this point, let us consider how music is different from words or realistic objects. An image of a known object essentially comes with defined boundaries. Hence, a collection of objects cannot depict the infinite. The same is applicable for words too. Words always define an impression with defined outline. A collection of words, be it a song or a poem or a novel, cannot convey the eternal or infinite. But music? Music is boundless. Music is the tool to convey a whole stretching from one horizon to the other. This is why, Kandinsky, inspired by Mystic outlook of the universe, wanted to blend music with painting.
Hence, with Kandinsky, emotion entered the realm of abstract expression.
In fact, in many paintings of Kandinsky, highly distorted hints of real-life objects figure. At this point, we can give several examples of Abstract expression in Europe in which intense feelings were depicted. Such paintings projected subjective reality, the truth of the artist. Many such artists were survivors of the World War. But then came Mondrian. The influence of the Indian mystic J Krishnamurthy left an indelible impression on his soul. Mondrian looked for ways to depict the infinite, the unified whole on canvas.
In the process, Mondrian reduced the existence into a few fundamental building blocks in the form of colour and shape. As I said, Mondrian too discarded all the excess and kept only what was the elemental reality. He chose only four colors, Red, Blue, Yellow and grey. And he zeroed in on the rectangle as shape. Such rectangles made of either of the four colours remained side by side snugly fitted inside a grid as if the canvas was a fraction of an infinite fabric made of building blocks of nature. Actually, there is no boundary at the edges of his tapestry of building blocks in most paintings. Hence, it feels like just a window through which we are looking at a section of the infinite stretch of existence.
Hence, Mondrian and even Kandinsky were primarily driven by mystic spirit.
Another great artist, Hans Arp, having his alignment with DADA revolution, went one step ahead. Due to the spirit of denial inherent in DADA, Hans Arp tried to discard all forms of human intervention in his art. As the embittered and angry souls of DADA intellectuals, afflicted by the injuries of the second world war, lacking any respect for the conventional values, the art they ventured to produce, also denied all conventions. Hans Arp was one of them. With the combined outlook of abstract expression of Mondrian and anti-conventional resolve of DADA, he made sure that his artworks must get created out of chance rather than deliberation. In the end, chance was in the purview God, not human.
Anything out of human effort was to be discarded. After all, the world war was the making of man.
Hence, the method adopted by Hans Arp was to tear off rectangular piece of papers and drop them randomly on another piece of coloured paper or canvas. That’s all. Whatever composition it assumed, was declared as the final piece of art by Hans Arp.
Hence, art left the realm of visually familiar objects and entered the sphere of expression of inner feelings that cannot be described through words or predefined shapes and forms. And in addition, the profound realizations of the infinite and its unity as envisioned in mystic worldview began to manifest time and again on the canvas.
Now, let us look at what happened in America.
Jackson pollock began from figurative paintings embedded with mythical symbols. And then after his stint with Jungian philosophy, he turned inward and tapped the subconscious. If we follow the gradual transformation of his paintings, we shall notice that the very images of landscape transformed into complete abstraction. But such expression of order in chaos was not entirely new. Andre Masson, a surrealist artist, had done the same almost at the same time. The expression of the mysterious inner turmoil reflected on the canvas in the form of scrawls influenced Pollock deeply. In the painting, Shimmering substance, we can still feel the glowing jumble of grass under midday sun.
But as time progresses, his paintings turn more incomprehensible from the perspective of visual reality.
The same transformation can be seen in the paintings by Willem De Kooning. Figurative elements gradually transformed into complete abstraction. However, in the case of Pollock, figurative elements began to make a comeback at a later stage. For example, please have a look at the following painting by Pollock from his black painting series. You will see eyes, parts of faces, birds and so on.
Hence, the two legends of abstract expression were not that abstract really. As I said in the beginning, in the process of discarding the excess and the distracting elements of visual reality, their paintings ended up into images consisting of forms and shapes totally unfamiliar to our daily life.
Then there was Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. Their style was rooted in mysticism. These artists, being disillusioned by the massacre of the second world war, hunted for the truth of life in the origin of human lives in this universe. The Supreme, the infinite of the eternal existence calmed them. Like the other abstract expressionists, they too clasped the myth because the reality could not be expressed in terms of human words and worldly forms.
All three of them filled the entire canvas with single or a couple of colours. In case of Rothko, it was a continuum in which another cloud of a different colour floated like a ball of mist. The large paintings of Rothko moved the viewer to tears. As for Cyfford Still, a few sharp and bright strokes of colour slashed through the monochromatic backdrop. It feels like the sudden flash of enlightenment. Barnette Newman, depicted the origin or existence as narrated by Jewish Myth. At first there was a mystical cloud of nonexistence and then God said, ‘Let there be light. The bright rays cutting through the canvas in Newman’s paintings appear to be that stroke of light which led to the creation of all that we enjoy and suffer. The opposites were born on either side. Good, evil, hot and cold, war and peace and so on.
Hence, this is how abstract expressionism came to life. Of course, there had been great artists in the following period, but these few were the pioneers. The Indian artists like V. S. Gaitonde, S. H. Raza, Tyeb Mehta, and many others were funded by Rockefeller Foundation and hence the CIA, which allowed them to visit the West and receive direct exposure to the paintings by Rothko, Barnett Newman, as well as Pollock and De Kooning. Each Indian artist was influenced in his own unique way. They saw the finger pointing to the moon and ventured on their own respective journey, which was unique. But in the end, most of the artists evolved into abstract expressionists from either figurative or landscape styles. Many of them, in India and the West, were driven by the spirit of mysticism. Abstract expression was not that much abstract after all!
But a million dollar question hangs. What is the future of abstract expressionism? Is it going to suffer the fate of visual realism of yesterday? After all, visual realism lost charm as camera became way of life. The youngsters of today were born with mobile phones equipped with camera. Digital twin of any real life object or human does not appeal them when they see it on paper or canvas painted by an artist. But lately, there are plenty of apps distorting an image into the way one wants. Any mood can be conjured up on the screen by the flick of a finger. Will abstract expression too recede into a thing of the past in the coming days?
I don't think so. There had always been two kinds of abstract expressions. One was process driven and the other was emotion driven. Artists like Pollock, Rothko, Gaitonde or Raza will stay all the time because their paintings are expressions of their inner feelings or deep realizations. A machine does not realize some eternal truth or it does not feel. There can never be an expression by a machine. At most, a machine can only trick our eyes with its operational process. Hence, sincere and honest expressions on canvas will stay for ever.
Comments