 The World of Abstract
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Those who followed the course of abstraction in the past 70 or 80 years have been struck by its persistence. When the Cercle et Carré exhibition took place in April 1930, the Parisian press has informed us that this painting was "the ghost of a simple experiment that was thought long dead," and that "this has nothing new to offer. "In 1955, the explosions of the same weariness and boredom, if not anger, can be heard at an exhibition of abstract art:" the time of joke was buried ... same old bag of tricks ... poor old consumer. "
Perhaps. But things become quite different if we are patient enough to take a closer look. Then we see that abstract art has never stopped adding to its range and means of expression, never wavered in its quest for a greater depth. If the ABC of this language was firmly established in the "heroic" phase by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and Delaunay, this does not mean that everything has been said in the same language. Ignorance of the critics and the public refined growl were unable to prevent branching in the remotest corners of the Western world, where he won more intelligent collectors and gained influence, considerable sway even in museums and municipal galleries. Kandinsky and Mondrian, who both lived into old age, thanks to their long life showed their successors a range of values ??that can be drawn from these simple elements, Kandinsky and Mondrian by highlighting the inventiveness of importance of increasing depth.
Other schools or movements that have arisen so many around the world in the last hundred years all enjoyed a much shorter life. At the time of writing (1955), abstract painting flourished for four decades and shows no signs of slowing vitality. Critics who have started encouraging it, but now take a long face with a geometric composition by Vasarely or color-composition by Riopelle, remember me when Zola, throwing on his former friends Impressionists in 1896, he expressed his disappointment in a notorious article in the Figaro that does not stand to his credit: "Not one artist in this group," writes the author of The Work, "has managed to translate into painting, with the least power of the purpose, the new formula which is observed in extracts of their paintings different ... They are all precursors. Genius is yet to be born ... They are all unequal to the task they have set They can not talk, they stutter. "
Museum at the Jeu de Paume (for example), we can now go see exactly what it meant to stuttering. Oracle is not necessary to provide that in fifty years, another Jeu de Paume is an astonished public showing of these masterpieces of abstract art that are painted at the moment and treat us with contempt. But those who have been keeping a close watch on art over the past twenty years or thirty have also noticed that in the twentieth century all art has evolved in the sense of abstraction. Thus, the term abstract art can not be used to identify a school, or any movement, however, widespread. This is a universal phenomenon, a universal language.
Abstract art has gone on too long so it stays put down to snobbery, while its styles and types of expression are too numerous and different for it to be in danger of being called academic. It is more accurate and simpler to consider it as a new beginning, starting with a new principle or data, namely freedom of self expression, regardless of all laws, but those invented by the artist or his material chosen imposed. As with phrases such as "a new basis for a more direct expression of man" or "a sound foundation for the life of the mind", I am reluctant to talk in terms of 'bases' or 'foundations' by referring to abstract art in general, for these words imply the concept of a plan or theory, and therefore any system or method. There are twenty different systems or methods of abstract art, and sometimes if some seemingly more valuable than others, it is because the success or failure of systems depends entirely on the talents that operate at a time given, or the stature of the genius departs.
Abstract art is an art itself, art of all time, but grasped in its innermost essence, I mean the fear of anything that determines that art is art, not not only an illustration or education or propaganda or a substitute for literature or religion. It may be a dangerous and certainly a risk shocking. I am not likely to be saying that abstract art is an easy art. There is no abstract art, without awareness, but weak or difficult to express in words, the very nature of art, or without a secret union between the artist and his art herself totally to the exclusion of any other alliance. Not a philosophy but a vision, a vision. And this intuition could not speak in any other manner that the very act of creation. From now on the mind of man will be expressed by a direct action of the creator of the material liabilities, without, as formerly, through these external forms that are already generally accepted as "beautiful "or" ideal for photos. "
A new beginning in the art, therefore, but to which it is not necessary to presuppose a base or foundation: it strikes at and radiates in all directions, without any particular direction being the dominant. This bothers a lot of values ??that people thought were permanently assured, and that is why abstract art creates almost as much hostility halfway through the century as it did thirty years ago. But his arrival was announced in the logical progression of the life of art itself. We can be sure that mockery, sarcasm, violence (cries of "degenerate art"), nor shrugged shoulders of indifference can never long prevail against the organic evolution of things.
Even among these new artists, various trends and their spokesmen are waging a war without thank you. Listening to some of them, everyone can take abstract art to be an endless process of destruction, or to imagine that nobody has the right to paint, except it is always in a hypnotic trance, or who does not find pleasure every day in a sort of frenzy of painting which is linked at the end of some form of aggression. According to others, abstract art, which they claim only deserves to be called art, can not be anything but a series of exercises in construction, a matter of smart scaffolds and plans made by architects a bit shy. So we must take our stand outside of it and not take part in these quarrels, if we are to see that abstract art is simply the stage that has now been reached in the general evolution of the arts, style multifaceted art of the twentieth century.
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