Relevance of this discussion of abstraction to my work
Because my ceramic work will involve abstracting elements of the seasons & natural surroundings (e.g. as of found objects and recorded in my photographs, especially those collected on my glaze reference page), I thought it would be valuable to discuss Robert Zimmer’s paper on abstraction. I will be concerned here largely with the first part of the paper, in which he unpacks the word’s etymology and summarises abstraction in [admittedly, mainly Western] art over the last few centuries. Whilst this is obviously a partial survey only, I think it is useful nonetheless as it arguably frames how we [as contemporary Westerners] tend to think of abstraction. As such it can provide a sort of baseline from which I can explore my own thinking.
Because Zimmer’s writing is extremely precise and compact in its survey of ideas, my discussion of his paper will frequently quote it at length.
1. Defining abstraction in art
WHAT IS ABSTRACTION IN ART?
The word ‘abstract’ comes from the Latin abstrahere, which means to draw away. The connotations of the word and its cognates can either be negative — as in the use of ‘abstracted’ for ‘absent-minded’ — or positive — as in the ‘abstract universal truths’ that are the theorems of geometry. The question of value is a matter of what has been left behind, and what we are left with after the drawing away: the abstracted man has left the world behind; the abstract truth has left behind all vagaries and contingencies. The tradition of abstraction in art is a series of attempts towards something approaching the second example.
Since at least the eighteenth century, the contention that an artist has used abstraction in creating a work of art means that he or she has uncovered the essence of a thing (Morgan 1994). The artist is thought to arrive at this essence by throwing away everything that is peculiar to a particular instance of an object or a particular moment of time, leaving only the essential, universal properties of the object or scene. The history of art is filled with restatements of this point. For example, Matisse wrote: ‘Underlying this … superficial existence of things…one can search for a truer, more essential character which the artist will seize so that he may give reality to a more lasting interpretation’ (Matisse 1978).
The status of this essential thing that the artist wishes to seize is much debated, and the question had a certain urgency in the nineteenth century. To Schopenhauer, for example, the essence is the Platonic Ideal, an ideal figuration that predates all specific instances (Schopenhauer 1958). To Hegel, the ‘essence’ or ‘universal idea’ is something man-made; he writes of the process of abstraction as allowing painters to recreate ‘the existent and fleeting appearance of nature as something generated afresh by man’ (Hegel 1975). The Hegelian view currently holds sway, and fits better with the project that underlies this paper.
— Zimmer, pp.1285-6 (emphasis mine)
I find the opening of Zimmer’s paper (above) extremely helpful, because the derivation of the term ‘abstract’ from the Latin abstrahere illuminates a metaphorical dimension of the term I had previously been unaware of. As Zimmer identifies, it is this metaphorical sense of the word which links its negative and positive evaluative uses - even though the metaphor is not immediately apparent in modern usage.
In explicitly focusing in on the relatively recent past (he will largely be discussing developments ‘since..the eighteenth century’), Zimmer identifies a window of time narrow enough that he will be able to develop a coherent line of discussion. He might have placed more emphasis on the fact that his initial discussion largely focuses on European/Western art only - as the history of abstraction is massively different in other places. (Examples he uses from Indian and African art history later in the paper do implicitly demonstrate this, but it could have been stated more emphatically.)
Zimmer then goes on to identify two competing models of abstraction which emerged within Western thought by the nineteenth century — the Neoplatonic or Schopenhaurean model, and the Hegelian model.
‘As is made clear in the Hegel quotation, abstraction did not at first entail a move away from the figurative. However, once a process of abstraction is to the fore, the goal of capturing the essence of an object becomes something different from painting the most accurate, most detailed, likeness. This in turn opens up the possibility of a sequence of moves away from direct figurative art. The history of much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art can be mapped out in this way: as bridges, cathedrals, and trees become patches of colour in Impressionism, these patches of colour become objects in their own right in Pointillism and beyond that to pure geometric abstraction.’
Abstraction in van Doesburg’s An Object Transfigured
‘In figure 1, the sequence from the upper left picture to the lower right one is a clear development from a naturalistic picture of a cow to a geometric composition. The assumption behind this sequence is that what is essential to the original pictures not only remains as we move through these stages, but is in fact enhanced, or concentrated by the removal of what is inessential. The implication is that this essence is most powerfully expressed through the language of geometry. ‘
In my opinion, whether van Doesburg’s series works to successfully demonstrate the process of abstraction largely depends on precisely what he is intending to abstract - is it the actual cow itself, or the first, naturalistic painting (top left)? The series title - An object aesthetically transfigured - leaves this ambiguous. In the first case, if the ‘object’ is the cow itself, it is being seen from the same viewpoint & depicted four times, with the level of abstraction increasing each time. In the second case, if the ‘object’ is van Doesburg’s original naturalistic painting of the cow, then it is this mimetic likeness which is then itself ‘transfigured’ — abstracted further and further — in the following three pictures.
If the first is the case, then the goal of each picture is to represent the original cow, which personally I cannot see as a success. The later geometric fields of colour don’t suggest it visually or expressively. Moreover, the very idea of trying to abstract a very real and particular animal seems very strange to me — it suggests an attempt to somehow capture an abstract, Original Essence of “Cow” in a Platonic or Neoplatonic sense. I personally simply don’t think that is a thing, let alone a thing it’s possible to render in any meaningful way via painting.
On the other hand, if the second scenario is the case and van Doesburg’s focus is on ‘transfiguring’ his own original painting, then the process of abstraction is both more successful and more interesting. The three subsequent images draw attention to different aspects of the original painting. The first draws our attention to the cow as an object made up of disparate parts in space. Parallel stick-like rectangular fields mark out the cow’s legs - two much longer, transversing almost the whole canvas and capped at the top with two squares that suggest the mass of the joints where the legs join the body, despite the legs on the near side to the viewer, while two shorter rectangular fields indicate the other two legs. The cow’s head, which is lowered (a different position to that of the first image), is indicated by a flat black square, bordered by a small, slim rectangle which suggests an ear (the other being beyond the edge of the canvas). There is an interesting paradox here, in that van Doesburg interrogates the three-dimensional form of the cow by depicting it using ‘flat’ lines and fields - all mimetic techniques traditionally used to depict three-dimensional forms on a flat surface (e.g. variation of line thickness, shading, tonal variation) are discarded, save arguably for the dark wash in the lower half of the picture, which suggests the cow’s shadow.
The continuation of the third picture from the second is obvious - the array of rectangles is further ‘flattened’ and simplified: any distinction between the cow and the space around it is now gone; the diagonal lines & triangular fields previously used to indicate the line of the cow’s neck and its irregular black markings are now gone, replaced solely with intersecting black lines and fields that break up the picture space in a Mondrian-like way. Whilst this third image is a recognisable ‘abstraction’ of the previous one, it is not longer recognisable as a cow in its own right.
The final image is, again, recognisable only as an abstraction of the third. Here, van Doesburg has radically abstracted the content of the previous image so there is no longer any suggestion of an object in space, and arguably no suggestion even of the different interrelated parts suggested by the previous two pictures. Black rectangles and squares float freely in the white picture space, which is itself enclosed by a larger black rectangle.