Abstract Art

La collection Arts & esthétique propose de remettre en circulation des textes courts - recueils d’articles, essais, entretiens, aphorismes ou fragments - qui éclairent des productions artistiques passées et présentes sans distinction de genre. Chacun des titres permet au lecteur de se situer au coeur d’un débat théorique dont l’enjeu est toujours une meilleure compréhension de l’art.

Quels sont les rapports au paysage dans l’œuvre de Cy Twombly ? Comment le paysage est-il présent ? Peut-on parler d’un paysage abstrait ? Le but de cet article est d’étudier la notion du paysage et la manière dont elle se combine au vocabulaire abstrait de l’artiste. Nous tentons de décrire le fruit de cette combinaison et de l’inscrire dans un cadre théorique. Dans un deuxième temps, nous éprouvons cette démarche à travers l’analyse de l’œuvre Untitled Painting (Say goodbye Catullus to the shores of Asia Minor), 1994.
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How is the work of Cy Twombly connected to landscape? How is landscape present? Is it possible to speak of an abstract landscape? Through the analysis of Untitled Painting (Say goodbye Catullus to the shores of Asia Minor), 1994, this article studies the notion of landscape and the ways it is combined with the artist’s vocabulary.

A transcript of a conversation (originally held live -on Zoom, on July 3, 2020 in The New Social Environment platform of The Brooklyn Rail) between artist Tom McGlynn and painter Odili Donald Odita concerning the latter's work in context of the history of Western abstract painting and it's changing cultural relevance. Published in The Brooklyn Rail, Oct 2020 issue.

The lecture presents an overview and examples of a range of works drawn from two concurrent and related projects, collectively titled The Pictorial Bible series, which had been undertaken by John Harvey since 2000. The projects’ works were an attempt to translate texts from the Judaeo-Christian scriptures into visual images, abstractly; that is, without recourse to figuration or illustration. The presentation was given at the School of Art to coincide with an exhibition of The Pictorial Bible series, that was being held in London.
This was a public lecture presented at the Lunchtime Lecture series, School of Art, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK (November 28, 2007).

Review of major retrospective on artist Agnes Martin, on view at Tate Modern, 3 June - 11 October, 2015, at Kunstsammlung Nordrheim-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 7 November 2015 - 6 March, 2016,  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 24 April - 11 September, 2016, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 7 October 2016 - 11 January 2017. Published in Enclave Review 14, Summer 2016, pp.13-14. Enclave Review is a contemporary arts reviews sheet based in Cork, Ireland.

PhD dissertation: This dissertation examines how mass magazines framed American abstraction for a broad public during the years following the Second World War.  While art historians have devoted much attention to Abstract Expressionism’s place within the New York art establishment and its international promotion, the presentation of this and other art to the American public has been largely overlooked.  Most Americans who did not frequent museums and galleries or read art journals would have experienced art primarily in mass magazines such as Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post.  This dissertation investigates how such magazines defined modern art and its role in postwar American culture for millions of readers.

During the late 1940s mass magazines portrayed modern art as a culturally divisive issue in articles that ridiculed abstraction, describing it as a mediocre European derivation that required no skill and questioning whether it was art at all or actually a highbrow hoax on middle America.  As American abstraction gained support from art institutions and markets in the 1950s, magazines depicted modern art as a commonplace consumer object, a stylistic choice that demonstrated both the consumer’s personality and capitalist freedom.  By the end of the decade, mass magazines characterized Abstract Expressionism as the embodiment of American freedom and individualism, the leading international style, and an asset in the cultural Cold War.  Yet letters to the editors reveal that readers were still not convinced of the value of abstract art.  These mass magazine representations of abstract painting and readers’ responses to it constructed both a vision of postwar American culture and a middle American public for it.

Il paper è dedicato all'analisi delle vicende del Groupe de Grasse (1940-1942), variamente composto da perseguitati politici e artisti in esilio in attesa di un visto per emigrare negli Stati Uniti, trovatisi a condividere a stretto contatto un periodo stori-co estremamente travagliato e incerto. Dopo una breve introduzione sulla storia e la struttura di vari gruppi artistici creatisi nel Sud della Francia durante la Repubblica di Vichy, si passa ad analizzare il contributo dei singoli artisti e la loro idea di collettività artistica. Si intende pertanto riflettere sui problemi storici posti da una tipologia di opere difficile da inquadrare all'interno del percorso di ogni singolo artista del gruppo. Dal punto vista metodologico si è scelto di operare un taglio eminentemente storico, sulla base di documenti inediti e testi rari provenienti dalla Stiftung Hans Arp di Berlino.

Pour la philosophie des sciences, un paradigme
est la matrice disciplinaire adoptée
par une communauté scientifique. Il constitue
et délimite le champ, la logique et la pratique
à suivre de l’étude même : il identifie
l’objet d’étude de la recherche scientifique, les
problèmes auxquels on ne peut déroger et la
meilleure technique pour les affronter. Dans
son application, un paradigme est la conjonction
d’expériences, étayées par des maquettes,
qui peuvent être étudiées ou répétées. Le paradigme
prédominant est souvent une façon particulière
de voir la réalité : davantage et autre
chose qu’une méthode scientifique générale.....

This research intends to explore and understand the theoretical concepts of photographic abstraction to examine how a photographic object as a real object changes its meaning to become an abstract image. To achieve this, the signs of the photographic image were first examined from Charles Peirce's semiotic perspective to determine what the abstract image contains. Then, after examining the place of abstraction and its course in the history of photography, a threefold classification of abstract photographic images was proposed, which divided them into three areas: abstraction of the visible, visualization of the invisible, and mentalization of the purely visual. Finally, to answer the research question, three collections of Mehran Mohajer's works were compared with each other, and in them, the passage of the objects "glass" and "scaffolding" as examples of photographic objects from the visible in the collection "Present of Past" to the abstraction Visibility was examined in the collections of "Earth Air" and "Scaffolding" and it was shown that an object in photography, with the help of photographic arrangements, reaches metaphor and reaches the level of abstraction of the first type, and its sign role moves away from the iconic field.

“Quella di Rothko può essere annoverata tra la pittura del XX secolo più semplice da cogliere con un solo sguardo e da riconoscere, ma a patto che non ci si soffermi troppo, perché basta indugiare un poco per rendere l’esperienza di una complessità disorientante”.
La sfida di questa monografia critica su Mark Rothko (1903-1970), la prima in italiano, è di restituire tale complessità, indagando – con passione e rigore – la preoccupazione costante dell’artista per lo spazio e le ricadute sulla sua opera, visiva quanto teorica.
Le analisi, puntellate dagli scritti dell’artista e da documenti d’archivio inediti, ne restituiscono vivacemente il pensiero e le immagini, in un dialogo attento con il loro contesto storico e con il dibattito critico. Ad emergere sono le diverse sfaccettature dell’opera di Rothko che, al termine di una lettura che non nasconde i suoi parti pris, si ha voglia di tornare a guardare.

We trained generative models and decision tree classifiers with positive and negative examples of the neo-plastic works of Piet Mondrian to infer his compositional principles, to generate “faux ” works, and to explore the possibility of computer-based aids in authentication and attribution studies. Unlike previous computer work on this and other artists, we used “earlier state ” works—intermediate versions of works created by Mondrian revealed through x-radiography and infra-red reflectography—when training our classifiers. Such intermediate state works provide a great deal of information to a classifier as they differ only slightly from the final works. We used methods from machine learning such as leave-one-out cross validation. Our decision tree classifier had accuracy of roughly 70 % in recognizing the genuine works of Mondrian versus computer-generated replicas with similar statistical properties. Our trained classifier reveals implicit compositional principles underlying Mondr...

This paper takes Patrick Heron’s assertion as to the abstract nature of painting as a starting point for a phenomenological investigation into the way in which abstract works comport themselves. How do abstract paintings attain meaningfulness, and along which communicative channels is meaning attainable? Perhaps in opposition to Picasso’s denial of the possibility of abstract art, and affirmation of the vitality of figurative painting (and restatement of: ‘the power of the object’), Heron presented an alternative idea; declaring all painting to be, in effect, of the abstract. In positing an abstract primacy to one’s experience of the world in painting – Heron’s thesis, I will argue, opens more doors than it closes. In support of his hypothesis, Heron drew together the terms: ‘space’, ‘colour’ and ‘form’ – the bedrock of countless claims regarding abstraction’s truth – and invoked an: ‘abstract reality’, which painting (including that which is usually taken to be figurative painting) is seen to embody.

The relationship of abstract painting to the world has proven to be a problematic one. To revisit it is to wrestle with the notion of resemblance, and therefore to speculate as to how it is that one thing is able to point to another. In this work I will examine the degree to which abstraction – as idea – is compatible with an understanding of the serviceability of pictures, and, in so doing, shed light on the extent to which pictures might operate within painting as both language and something else. Central to this is a consideration of the limits of that which is deemed communicable; the method of comprehending abstract painting’s truth(s); what it is that the spectator is able to bring to the table; and how this bringing to can be woven into a fuller conception of abstract painting’s particular operability…from which colour, form and space might be made sense of. I will position abstract painting as an involvement: a form of engagement from which the spectator might come to better understand an engagement with form.

Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (Brescia 1914 - 1990) costituì una delle più importanti collezioni italiane d'arte contemporanea; continuamente aggiornata ad iniziare dagli anni Cinquanta, dalle tendenze astratte europee fino  alla New York School (Kline, Tobey, Rauschenberg),  alla pop art italiana,  inglese e americana ( Warhol, Dine, Wesselmann) e agli esordi dell'Arte Povera italiana degli anni Settanta

This paper explores how, on the one hand, the MoMA’s agenda on US cultural imperialism in Brazil triggered a war between aesthetic traditionalists and reformers on the occasions of ‘From Figurativism to Abstractionism’, the MAM-SP opening exhibition (1949), and of the first and the second São Paulo Biennials (1951 and 1953). These exhibitions promoted abstractionism as a prestigious banner of modernisation in Brazil fostered by Nelson Rockefeller, a symbol of US capitalism and the head of the American museum. Starting from this premise, the paper shows that the Brazilian Modernista establishment working with figurativism reacted to the arrival of abstractionism in Brazil by labelling it a type of degenerate art with no social engagement, anti-Brazilian, and compliant with US imperialism. The paper will therefore highlight how the MAM-SP pro-abstractionist campaign for aesthetic innovation, developed with the support of the MoMA and of Rockefeller, was rejected by the Brazilian cultural establishment engaging with the struggle of the masses against the national elite for being a clear evidence of foreign hegemony and capitalist interest.

On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu.  The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.

The British artist Ralph Rumney never adhered to a fixed sense of self. Of the little documentation that exists of his life and work, most is comprised of his own disparately collected thoughts, letters, notes, interviews, images and recollections. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1934, he experienced an unsettled and repressive childhood in Wakefield, prompting him to leave home ‘by stages’. His adolescent years were spent lodging with the ‘notorious communist’ Edward Thompson, hitching to London in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, and then travelling around Cornwall meeting ‘all those Cornish artists like Pat Heron and Terry Frost and Brian Winter — and Barbara Hepworth’, until, in order to avoid arrest as a conscientious objector, he moved where the currents bore him, between London, Paris, Milan and eventually settling for a time in Venice. The writer, painter and only member of the British branch of the Situationniste International, was often the one behind the Rolleiflex camera.

Conférence 30 novembre 2021 :
"When New York looks at the School of Paris (1930-1950). Reception, Rereadings and Appropriations".

On the occasion of the exhibition :
"Chaïm Soutine / Willem De Kooning, painted embodied".
Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. 15 septembre 2021 - 10 janvier 2022

L’analyse consacrée à la diffusion et réception critique de l’œuvre de Chana Orloff aux États-Unis entre 1929 et 1947 aspire à démonter un avant et un après – le déplacement du centre artistique mondial de Paris à New York – et le chemin qu’emprunta cette artiste pluridisciplinaire afin de considérer sa place en tant que telle, le déploiement de sa carrière aux États-Unis et particulièrement, l’accueil critique qui lui fut concédé. À travers cette critique d’art, l’importance de la culture française aux États-Unis, dans la première partie du XXe siècle, se fait jour. D’une part, des artistes, des architectes, des écrivains et des mécènes américains vinrent à Paris dans la première moitié du siècle. D’autre part, en se rendant outre-Atlantique dès l’entre-deux-guerres, Chana Orloff ne fut pas une singularité. Elle comprit l’intérêt de s’allier aux Américains, qui Juifs pour la plupart, étaient pétris de culture européenne et désireux de resserrer les relations franco-américaines. En exposant à l’étranger, Chana Orloff représenta en quelque sorte l’État français aux États-Unis.

Ranadhir Roy based his compositions for the esraj on the principle that they should be received as autonomous works not dependent on verbal language and liberated from the traditional notion of privileging the human voice. This paper proposes some ways of understanding these key principles behind Roy's compositions. Written in Bengali, the paper is a detailed version of a lecture given at a screening of the documentary film "Esrajer Ranadhir" by Jibansmriti Digital Archive in Kolkata on 20 July 2019.

Esta publicación recoge el pensamiento de Miró sobre el arte, abordando temas como el dolor, el vacío, la función social del arte o el impulso creador.
Cuenta además con la particularidad de estar maquetado por el artista Ignacio Llamas, de modo que los vacíos y la irregularidad en la distribución de los textos ayudan a enfatizar el contenido de las lecturas.
This publication gathers Miró's thinking on art, addressing topics such as pain, emptiness, the social function of art or the creative impulse.
It also has the particularity of being designed by the artist Ignacio Llamas. The gaps and irregularity in the distribution of the texts help to emphasize the content of the readings.

"The exhibition, THE ARTIST MAGICIANS (LOS ARTISTAS MAGOS)
James K-M (Canada), Joel Jover Llenderrosos (Cuba), Osmany Soler Mena (Cuba) was held December 18, 2009 – January 18, 2010 at Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas, Camagüey, Cuba.
Curated and catalogue essay by Pavel Alejandro Barrios Sosa, translated English version by Carol Sill
With their personal visions the artists Joel Jover Llenderrosos, Osmany Soler Mena and James K-M translate in a subconscious or instinctive way the survival of the original meanings of primal art."

Today there is little serious interest in alchemy.  It seems part of a past that no longer has much to tell us heirs of the Enlightenment.  Even more than astrology it seems to have a place on the intellectually suspect fringes of our modern world.  This makes it difficult for us to recognize and do justice to the widespread interest in alchemy in the twentieth century.
Rooted in ancient and hermetic traditions presented under the veil of enigma, allegory and symbols, alchemy is a transformative practice predicated on the belief that Spirit is present in all that is in the universe. The goal of the ancient alchemist was to accomplish the Great Work, the realization of Spirit in matter, figured by the transformation of lead into gold.  On one level this effort was a proto-chemistry; on another, a psychological quest: as lead is transmuted into gold, so the soul is purified, dissolved and crystallized anew, to reveal Spirit.
These two metaphors for alchemy, as psychological change and as transformation of matter, are intimately linked in the painting of Jackson Pollock. I will focus here on one drawing from c. 1943, given as a gift to his first biographer, B. H. Friedman. Its symbolic images and numbers, and, rare in Pollock's work, sequence of words, provide crucial insight into Pollock's art: his symbolic figuration, his turn to abstraction, his quest for meaning which persists throughout his career. Understanding the import of the drawing takes us to two of Jung's texts on alchemy to which Pollock had access. Emotionally needy, he was in Jungian analysis between 1939-43 and open to the alchemical myth with its promise of integration and redemption. But as James Elkins demanded of the painter, he practices a pictorial alchemy, spiritualizing matter. Pollock does not simply illustrate Jung. In showing what Pollock made of his alchemical knowledge, I will have occasion to refer to the widespread cultural and artistic interest in alchemy in the 1930s and early 40s as well as the more immediate context of his own mythic works of 1942-43. Here we see Pollock in the laboratory, the alchemist painter, launching himself on a pictorial journey that revolutionized abstract painting. 
Challenging the commonly perceived rupture between Pollock's early symbolic imagery and his abstract work, alchemy lets us understand the early symbolic work as the very basis for Pollock's turn to abstraction in the poured paintings. Countering the material positivism of Clement Greenberg's aesthetic response to Pollock's abstraction, still dominant in the literature, alchemy allows us to appreciate Pollock's spiritual approach to matter. The transformative dynamism of destruction- creation worked out in symbolic imagery continues to animate the abstract poured paintings of 1947-50.

Interview exploring abstraction's use as a resource for artists working from transgender and queer perspectives.  Focus is placed on the resistance to compulsory self-disclosure and to protocols of surveillance and voyeurism.  Also discussed is the relation of these ideas to my historical work on the 1960s which makes a case for the widespread urgency of transgender theory by infiltrating canonical narratives and artists.

L’antimateria è il soggetto ideale di una fisica per poeti. Persino nell’ineccepibile vocabolario Treccani si legge ad vocem, con una formulazione involontariamente ironica: “il motivo dell’assoluta prevalenza della materia sull’antimateria nell’universo osservato non è ancora chiaro”. Chiara invece, anche ai poeti, era la loro differenza. Michel Foucault, ad esempio, riconosceva un potere alle parole di André Breton rispetto a quelle di Sartre, alla rivoluzione rispetto alla storia, al surrealismo rispetto al marxismo ortodosso o all’esistenzialismo. Foucault distingueva un regime della rivoluzione e un regime della storia, uno che mirava a cambiare la vita, l’altro la politica. Al punto che Breton puntava a creare un’antimateria rispetto al mondo. Se quest’operazione si realizza esclusivamente sul terreno della scrittura e del linguaggio – un libro, una frase, una parola –, nulla ci impedisce di estenderla alla sfera visiva.

For the first time in the history of photography, digital photographers can now experiment with photographic effects and immediately review the results. This capability, which is crucial for experimentation, opens up a new world of imagery with slow shutter speeds that 'paint' light in a variety of ways. Yet some people believe that the effects of movement in slow-exposure photography are about the same and accidental. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a quite sophisticated vocabulary, a physics of light and motion, that can be understood and once understood is not accidental. This eBook details the ways these different motions are registered on photographs and the new artwork that is now possible -- work that has its roots in modern art.

These Pixelscapes were found within a photograph of Kazimir Malevich (Ukranian-born artist, 1878-1935) via magnification, filter treatment (halftone) and isolation of the pixel(s) in Photoshop. Malevich founded the art movement, Suprematism in Moscow, 1913 as a parallel to Constructivism. Suprematism ("supremacy of forms") is a study in abstraction conceived in itself ... non-objective and not related to anything except geometric shapes and colors ... and a precursor to Minimalism.

The rise of the Aboriginal Australian art movement in the early 1970s ushered in an artistic revolution. But like any important revolution, it did not stop there. As the twenty-first century approached, Aboriginal artists across the continent began transforming their traditional iconographies into more abstract styles of art making. Speaking across cultures, without sacrificing their distinctive identities, they found new ways to express the power of the ancestral narratives of the Dreaming. Drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, No Boundaries features the work of nine trailblazing artists who were at the forefront of this movement: Paddy Bedford, Jananggoo Butcher Cherel, Prince of Wales (Midpul), Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Billy Joongoora Thomas, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, and Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Each one was a respected senior Lawman, knowledgeable in every aspect of Aboriginal ceremonial traditions. Inspired by these ancient cultural practices, they forged one of the most dynamic painting movements of recent times. By exploring the cross-cultural potential of abstract painting, they drew attention to the entangled networks that define the contemporary experience, reminding us that contemporary art comes from every corner of the globe. The art and life of each artist is given in-depth analysis by leading art historians, curators, critics, and anthropologists. The essays shed light on the rich and complex histories behind the artworks, placing them in the context of traditional Indigenous culture, the environment, colonial experience, and the global contemporary art world. In doing so, they reveal nine artists working at the vanguard of contemporary art practice.

Includes new essays by Henry F. Skerritt, John Carty, Edwina Circuitt, William L. Fox, Stephen Gilchrist, Jens Hoffmann, Darren Jorgensen, Emily McDaniel, Ian McLean, Fred Myers, Una Rey, Quentin Sprague, and Luke Scholes.

This dissertation project investigates the transcultural encounters of Japanese avant-garde calligraphers of the 1950s and 60s with the contemporaneous Euroamerican abstract artists. It is based on the analysis of the activity and works of the prominent Japanese avant-garde calligraphy group Bokujinkai ("People of the Ink") headed by Morita Shiryū (1912-1998), Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and other calligraphers.

Research paper presented at the conference In Black and White: Photography, Race, and the Modern Impulse in Brazil at Midcentury, at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, May 3, 2017.

In June 1950, Brazil became the only non-European country among the fifteen founding members of the International Federation of Photographic Art (known as FIAP, abbreviation from the organization’s name in French: Fédération internationale de l'art photographique).
Established in Switzerland in 1950, during the next fifteen years FIAP brought together national associations and federations of photographers from fifty-five countries in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The main goal of FIAP was to create a global framework for creative photography—which they called “photographic art”—through activities such as publishing the FIAP Yearbooks of photography, organizing the FIAP Biennial, and circulating its official magazine, Camera.

During the 1950s, the concept of " photographic art " had quite different meanings in different countries. FIAP attempted to give a unified framework for this concept on a global scale. The FIAP Yearbooks witness the struggle of photographers to achieve the status of artists. The existence and popularity of a transnational organization such as FIAP suggests that this was a valid struggle across cultures and continents. By the end of the 1950s, however, there was only one major case where this struggle had succeeded, at least partially and for some time—it was the Bandeirante photographers who were recognized by the professional art world and whose work was showcased in the São Paulo Biennial. In a way, this was the ideal scenario that FIAP members everywhere wanted to achieve, but for most photographers it remained only a dream.