 The World of Abstract
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Oriental Journey II Art Print Li-Leger, Don 27.625 in. x 27.5 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted The main line of the Western tradition in art is based on the solid structure of the Greco-Roman heritage. But from the Athens of Pericles to the Paris Declaration of 1900, a second tradition emerged in various places and, almost always at times of crisis, crossed the main line of development or run in parallel. This is the Eastern tradition.
Today we seem to be approaching a time when the transformation of artistic values, began in this century, is accelerating its pace. From Giotto to cubism, Western art has had a strong unity and relatively few outside cultural influence. But within fifty years of its existence, modern art has broken sharply with the past. Insurgencies apparently contradictory of the twentieth century have all pressed toward the same goal: the destruction of the natural image. In turn, natural vision, the vision of man land, has been transformed by the world's inventions and technological change. This alteration of basic eye-opening to a modern artistic appreciation of the great cultures of the past that are aesthetically different from Western art. Modern communication, science, and especially the archaeological discoveries have completely changed our conception of the classical, medieval and modern.
The transition from traditional to modern art was done by transfusions from primitive and exotic sources. At the turn of the century, Japanese prints influenced Impressionist art of the South Seas, Gauguin, Islamic Art from North Africa, Matisse, and African sculpture, the Cubists. Last came the great discoveries of Sir Aurel Stein in Central Asia, revealing mixed up Gobi oasis towns; the Tibetan tanka and banners, the Buddhist caves of Tun Huang. And India, the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh, which in the nineteenth century were treated as ethnology, were rediscovered as art. Today it is the arts of the Far East which are ubiquitous in the artistic atmosphere and whose influence we can expect to see more. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the minor arts and decadent periods of art from the Far East has become known and appreciated. Now he is the great art of Han China, Tang and Sung dynasties, and Nara in Japan, Fujiwara and Kamakura periods, which are to become familiar in the West.
There were centuries when the East and West were outside, and Western history was written as if Asia did not exist. So does China and Japan used to close their doors to the West. But in the past there have also been periods of intense communication between East and West. Ideas, art objects and artists traveled through the deserts of Asia by caravans, slowly but as surely as they do today by truck and air. In the Late Roman Empire, Europe was swept by successive waves of Eastern influence resulted in the triumph of Christianity, originally an Eastern faith. It was the Crusaders who led the Arab world of abstract forms back in Europe, grow the Gothic style. Conversely, the Greek ideal of art was made from Europe to Afghanistan and India, and from there, transmuted by the vision of Buddhism entered China, Korea and Japan, creating some of the biggest in the world of sculpture and painting. As systole and diastole blood circulating in the body, the body of humanity throbs in periods of expansion and contraction.
Since WWII, we had an unprecedented expansion. The Westernization of Asia is moving forward with a speed vertiguous, and easternization of Western thought is tapping deep levels in our art and culture. Centrifugal movement today between East and West was made possible by the move towards the abstract in the West. Nobody can predict what ignites the human spirit and the student of simple organic to another dimension. But we have been through an axial shift in human thought since the beginning of this century. Whether on the web of modern communication that draws the world closer in time and space, the financial transactions that determine the world market, the physical sciences to explore the universe, the science of the mind - psychology and psychoanalysis - to delve into the soul of man, or just the gadgets of everyday life - all this was caused by abstract calculations and determined by abstract relationships. Is it any wonder that the meaning of art has followed this path?
During and after World War I, the pioneers of abstract art has developed a new plastic language in which local differences, especially national and were gradually absorbed by a universal expression. Of the child to the mature individual, and from distant cultures for the centers of modern civilization, this new ABC of the art world in the manufacture is open to all to read. Today it is widely accepted by the advertising, typography, design and architecture and is in use worldwide. On higher levels aesthetic, the tempo of change is slower and it may take time to merge the contributions of all cultures past and create a tradition of the art world. But today, all vital in the creative art takes place, mostly in abstract aesthetic arguments are all performed at this level.
Cubism, which deals with the biggest blow to the ancient art structure, marks the transition to this new vision. But all protests and destruction of Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism - not only produced many beautiful works of art, but in distorting, dissection, tear, burst, and erosion of the natural image, they helped pave the way for an expression totally the opposite. Among them was born pure plastic art, abstract and nonobjective. The first spark lit in Paris spread to the periphery of Europe and, simultaneously, he rose, Russia, Constructivism and Suprematism (Tatlin, Malevich, Lissitzky and) in Germany, Abstract Expressionism (Kandinsky , Klee, and Marc), France, Orphism (Delaunay and Kupka), and Holland, De Stijl (Mondrian, Van Doesburg, and Vantongerloo).
It was then that Western art was released to receive another vision, and greater rapprochement between East and West became possible. The birth of abstract art represented a fundamental change of culture towards a new sensory ideational. Once the image of the individual man to dominate nature - the central theme of the Renaissance-was removed, the boundaries of art have been extended to include the whole universe and the mind of man. The man took his place in the cosmos with all other living organisms. This "death of humanism" was in fact the extension of its ethos on a higher level. And Western art was brought close to the metaphysical speculations of Eastern thought: Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.
Of all the pioneers of abstract art, two men were more aware of the significance of this fundamental change in the art. Today's painting oscillates between two poles of expression: Mondrian and Kandinsky. In 1925, Kandinsky wrote that painting must inevitably leave the materialistic world-concept based on the Greco-Roman and move toward a spiritualized art facing east. Poles apart in their work, the paths of Mondrian and Kandinsky converge in their theoretical perspectives and philosophical. Both were involved in scientific research and new mathematics, to which they felt their work was parallel. They joined the Theosophical Society in Europe, who sought a synthesis between Eastern and Western thought. Both found no incongruity between science and metaphysics, for both were supported by idealism, anti-materialism, and universalism.
For Kandinsky and Kupka deserves credit for having created the first free paint object (1911). But the Pier and Ocean series, which Mondrian in Holland during World War I marked the logical break with the old tradition. In their new order of the vision set out: the abolition of the illusionist perspective, the supremacy of the aircraft, the dissolution of the object and the repetition and alternation of identical units. Great composition in the ocean, sea, earth, and stars are indicated by vertical and horizontal short in opposition. In the primordial ovoid, as in the circle of a mandala, the universe was born as a sign, its active ingredients and liabilities disclosed in the dynamic unity.
For the next thirty years, Mondrian was busy with the creation of a composition of orthogonal straight lines and planes of pure color, in which the classical heritage and tradition in northern Europe have been reconciled in a new equilibrium of the crystalline purity. This counterpoint of Western "form the ancient universal symbols transmuted into another plastic expression: the vertical than the active ingredient, the horizontal and the passive principle, the superposition of each other, the cross - the sign of generation and life. Mondrian's theory of opposites is similar to the Chinese theory of duality: Yang and Yin. Chinese rate was organic and done by the circle; Mondrian was angular and opposition. But his closing that the art and life is rhythm approached the first canon of Chinese art, made by Hsieh Ho in the fifth century AD, the paint must be the expression of rhythmic vitality of life, the revelation of the mind in space.
Western painting Mondrian raised any concern for the appearance in a realm of pure being. In this it resembles the doctrine of emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and not the nothingness that the West assumes it is, but the vacuum as the source of life, beyond name and form, in which all duality is at rest.
If Eastern mysticism Mondrian is concealed within a structure immaculate impersonal relationship Kandinsky in the East is ubiquitous in its color and space. Kandinsky was born in Moscow into a family whose ancestors had lived in the Chinese-Siberian border and its link with the Eastern tradition was inherited and real. Trained as an economist, he began painting seriously at age 45. In the history of Russian painting, which first adopted the Western tradition under Peter the Great, Kandinsky was the first painter of the stature and the only one whose influence has reached beyond the borders of Russia in Europe West and the Americas.
While Mondrian's ideas have changed the face of our modern cities, Kandinsky's work has transformed our world of inner feeling. From his early chromatic polyphonic improvisations, through his painting of geometric structures during his career teaching at the Bauhaus, its potent synthetic last in Paris, Kandinsky's work is like a mighty river flowing to its source. "What Kandinsky suddenly burst out," writes Willy Grohman, his friend and biographer, "was the soul of the East Asia, which conceives the world in a more complex, more specie aeternitatis As, more cosmo-magical than does the Western mind.
Every great movement in art history has a period of externalization when its principles are demonstrated in the world, and a period of internalization, when it turns inward to contemplate his own life. The decade 1935-1945 is the first step in the expansion of abstract art. In the years after World War I, when isolated pioneers made their discoveries, the mainstream of art was refluxed, seeking reconciliation with the natural image (Late Cubism, Neoclassicism, Neu-Sachlichkeit, the right wing of the Surrealists). But in 1930, the pioneers had emerged from obscurity to become leaders of a movement that swept Europe. At that time, artists have dominated structural. But the rise of dictatorships and the events leading to World War II, this evolution has ceased and many artists have left Europe. Abstract artists who came to the United States during the war (Mondrian, Léger, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) has had a profound influence on American painting and helped implement a direction to the abstract. The decade 1935-1945 was the age of Mondrian.
Mondrian died in New York in 1944, Kandinsky died the same year in Paris. The period immediately after the war saw the triumph of abstract art in the world. His ideas were carried out in distant countries and disparate in the Americas to Asia. But at the same time, a change occurred in the heart of the movement, the pendulum of constructivist thought in the world of sense. The decade just ended (1945-1955) was the age of Abstract Expressionism, and he stands under the sign of Kandinsky. It is possible that in the decade, we are now entering the two opposing currents in abstract art will merge and it will be provided by Eastern influences. Today's artists are mostly set back from the structural and formal, they spend an objective expression of a subjective test, the conscious to the unconscious creation, from a pulse the universal concentration on the individual's personality.
United States and Europe, the extreme wing of the abstract expressionists disintegrates as new ways. For some painters are nothing but the canvas, the artist and the operation of painting - the establishment of direct, immediate, bodily sensation, psychic or with minimal conscious. These are the Western activists, their art is more physically oriented than naturalists, more automatic than the surreal. They focus on behaviorism and new ways of expression to the exclusion of sense opened the door to backward-looking tendencies, resulting in the staining, Neo-Impressionism, and a return to the natural image.
This nostalgia for a sensual art of abundance, is apparently a natural reaction after considerable expenditure of energy in a destructive conflict. But not a strong tradition realistic was created on the ruins of the First World War and it remains to see if it can be done after World War II. Abstract expressionist all groups owe their origin, consciously or unconsciously, in the early, explosive Kandinsky. Then he moved to a Monet art of color and space freed, they move from its realization back to Monet and back beyond the natural image.
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