 The World of Abstract
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Abstract Masters
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In Paris, Cubism had begun to change around 1908. In contrast to the expression of fauvism emotion through color and pattern, Cubism was a search for new concepts of three-dimensional shape. The object was analyzed in its geometric components, disintegrated, reassembled into new combinations, shown from different sides simultaneously. Subject was limited to the concrete and tangible, the emotional content was avoided, the color was subordinate and monochromatic. This first analysis phase lasted until about 1913, then flourished in the free, more chromatic inventions of synthetic cubism. In the meantime, he had given birth to many other varieties of abstraction.
He also produces its own rebellions, as Orphism, started by Robert Delaunay in 1912, aimed at the highest fullness of color and pure abstraction, free of recalls cubism of the object. Orphism, in turn, had a rival in Synchromism (meaning "with color"), launched in 1913 by two Americans in Paris, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Both were intelligent thinkers, and they had a champion hinged brother Willard Huntington Wright latter, a brilliant critique dogmatic, so that their movement gave the culmination of Western art. It is true that their theories were beyond Orphism in the analysis of the relationship of color to the form: in particular the fact that warm colors (red, orange, yellow) appear to move toward the eye, while the colder (blue, purple, blue-green) retirement, so that the color sensations produced projection and recession that can be used to build the form. Their clear statement of this principle has been a decisive contribution to modern aesthetics.
He also produces its own rebellions, as Orphism, started by Robert Delaunay in 1912, aimed at the highest fullness of color and pure abstraction, free of recalls cubism of the object. Orphism, in turn, had a rival in Synchromism (meaning "with color"), launched in 1913 by two Americans in Paris, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Both were intelligent thinkers, and they had a champion hinged brother Willard Huntington Wright latter, a brilliant critique dogmatic, so that their movement gave the culmination of Western art. It is true that their theories were beyond Orphism in the analysis of the relationship of color to the form: in particular the fact that warm colors (red, orange, yellow) appear to move toward the eye, while the colder (blue, purple, blue-green) retirement, so that the color sensations produced projection and recession that can be used to build the form. Their clear statement of this principle has been a decisive contribution to modern aesthetics.
After first applying it to recognizable figures, both Synchromists moved to pure abstraction in 1913. This year they have held exhibitions in Munich and Paris, and engaged in a war with joyful Orphists. But their actual paintings were much like their rivals' - compositions of prisms and multi-colored swirling disks. Later, they created a more original and complex, as in the Oriental Macdonald-Wright in 1918. A year later, however, both abandoned abstraction and returned to the figure. They had developed a method, but not content. However, their theories have influenced other Americans - Andrew Dasburg, and Thomas H. Benton, who was then striving to reconcile the shape of the Renaissance with the color Synchromist.
Orphism was a disciple of the former beast Patrick Henry Bruce, who remained in Paris until 1930. After its phase Orphist, Bruce went on his way. His great concern was the abstract structure. Uncompromising in their clarity, his paintings with their angular geometric shapes and pure colors have been carefully designed and strongly constructed, with the relationships between forms finely felt. Of pure abstraction Bruce returned to semiabstraction based on specific patterns, such as still life on a table in the paint. But he remained consistent in his devotion to the architecture. Dying on his pictures, he painted some of them and destroyed most.
In the U.S. there was little abstract art before the Armory Show. The show, with full representation of the cubists, gave impetus to abstraction, and for the next decade a number of Americans practiced - Weber, Dove, Walkowitz, Hartley, Dasburg, William Zorach, Konrad Cramer, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Man Ray. Most of these Americans were less concerned about problems of a purely formal than Europeans. Cubism had a few representatives, including Dasburg, Weber, Zorach, and in modified form, Arthur B. Davies, but there were few orthodoxy. Even in Paris, analytical cubism was the creation of a few artists in recent years. An experimental laboratory, he had a phase (if a critical issue) of the entire evolution of abstraction.
In America there was little research so radical. The most lucid American champion of cubism, in his writing and teaching as well as his painting was Andrew Dasburg. After a period of pure abstraction, approximately 1912 to 1916, his style became more or less representative, yet definitively Cubist. Focus strongly on the geometric structure of natural objects and their translation into the design of plastic, he showed a concern for the basic shape unusual in American modernist. But if Cubism had few followers, he had to exert great influence with emphasis on the three-dimensional shape and its tendency toward abstraction.
In general, the American abstract art inclined to be expressionistic rather than formal. Max Weber, whose work from 1912 to 1916 he revealed that the most mature abstract painter of the time in this country, was also representing the most inventive of Cubism, but in his hands it became something else entirely. His compositions based on New York were linked to Cubism in style, but their celebration contentlyrical of the modern city - was closer to Delaunay early and futuristic. In contrast to the analytical cubism of the subject matter limited, they expressed feelings aroused by the drama of the city - they imagined the light and movement, and took elements of large space that Cubism shunned. Chinese Restaurant Weber writes: "Going into a Chinese restaurant in the darkness of the night outside, a maze and blaze of light seemed to divide into fragments of the interior and its contents .... Light so piercing and so bright, so liquid color and life and movement so enchanting! To express this, kaleidoscopic means should be chosen. "There was a chromatic fantasy far from the austerity of analytical cubism. In the abstract work of Weber as a whole, a leading role was played by color, which reminded the opulence of Russian origin of the artist, and the forms were less likely to be geometric and rectilinear and curvilinear as free Even his most cubists were basically expressionist, his affinities were all in the abstract expressionism of Kandinsky as cubism.
The same was true of another early abstractionist, Abraham Walkowitz, in its purely abstract linear arabesque, and his semi-abstract pictures based on New York, where the skyscrapers, crowded streets and underground tunnels, considered as part of a single large, were incorporated into linear models flowing. Walkowitz is best known, however, for his expressionist idylls of men and women and children outside, embodying a simple love of humanity, and talking online sensitive and lyrical color.
These first manifestations of what has come to be called Abstract Expressionism (in many cases a more precise term would be expressionistic abstract) occurred with little or no influence of Central European counterpart, abstract expressionism group Blaue Reiter. An exception was the case of Marsden Hartley, who in his three years in Germany between 1912 and 1915 came into direct contact with the group and especially with the work of Kandinsky. For Hartley it was a liberating influence, to stimulate painting large compositions in bold color powerful, almost childlike in their directness and simplicity, but in the beautiful visual impact. Somewhat incongruous for an artist temperament Hartley, they incorporated fsymbols of German militarism current flags, iron cross, and the German national colors - red, white and black. Hartley was through subsequent phases of the summary before returning to figurative expressionism around 1920.
More indigenous forms of abstraction were those of Arthur G. Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe. Dove and a half year in France in 1907 and 1908 was mostly spent outside of painting, far from Paris, and, as with Marino, it was after his return to America, and Stieglitz, that he came in full contact with modernity and evolved its individual character. The Art of Dove was close to the earth; his reasons were derived from nature, its forms of those trees, animals, clouds. It was a very personal style: free rhythmic forms, bold flat models, resonant harmonies of earth - an original expression, not schools, a product of the emotion experienced. He was among the first in this country to create pure abstractions; several small oils dating from 1910 were curiously parallel to the ongoing work of Kandinsky, but with no known effect. While still maintaining its direct sources in nature, Dove has remained consistent in his abstract style and semi-abstract.
For Georgia O'Keeffe abstraction was also a language more personal nature. This enlightened teacher Arthur Wesley Dow (who had also taught Weber), with its design principles based on oriental art, had opened his eyes to the falsity of academic naturalism, but his first independent creations (a series of drawings in 1915) were already marked by a singular vision. While most of his work performance was from the beginning, it also produces abstractions, as pure as some painting. The two modes are essentially the same: in both the design was bold and effective, the mass balance accurately predicted, the style very clear and precise. Yet there was always an element of mystery, a sense of dark depths behind the shiny surface.
The first abstract movement in the United States lasted from 1912 until about 1920. Most of its practitioners later returned to more representational styles, mostly expressionist. Only a few - Dove, Stuart Davis, and young men like Calder, Noguchi and Gorky - remained faithful to the abstract belief. This relatively short duration call be attributed to several factors. American abstract art was not, as in Europe, the product of long historical evolution. American modernists did not feel, like many of their European colleagues that figurative art has been completed, and that management was available only to abstraction. Our world of art, having just been rudely awakened from his sleep academic, was not yet ready for so radical a departure from tradition. Most American artists still felt the need of more direct relationship with reality. The novelty of abstraction, and logic and purity of his philosophy, had appealed especially to young people, but many artists as they grew older were pulled back to the representation, with all its richness of values associative.
In the early 1920s came the inevitable reaction against advanced forms of modernity. In addition to the declaration of representation, there was a revived interest in the American scene, and a new concern with strong social content. For over a decade - the 1920s and early 1930's-like - advanced styles were much less in evidence here and abroad. It was not until the mid-1930s did the second wave of abstraction, on which we are always on horseback, began to gather force.
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