On Art

...Yet form, no matter how free of literary or psychological associations, has a cultural history and a personal morphology, and in one's actual experience of particular abstract paintings—a Pollock, say, or a de Kooning—it is this historical and morphological element which is often uppermost in one's consciousness...

...History left them no other alternative, and in this respect altered the meaning of their work...

...We are thus not only being asked to forego the noble aspirations of former times, but to expunge from our consciousness even our awareness of their former existence...

...This exhibition of "The Classic Spirit" is, therefore, among other things, another chapter in the collapse of the radical impulse—in this instance, of its collapse into "success...

...This is especially true of the younger artists in the show, but it applies also, if for different reasons, to the older European artists, who are the only ones in this survey who could conceivably make claim to the mantle of classicism...

...It reminds one, if one needs reminding, of how much talent, ingenuity and facility crowd the art scene at the present moment...

...Even the commitment to "science" turned out (in Gabo's case, for example) to be another form of personal mysticism, and these exponents of purity, impersonality and universality were left, for the most part, to develop their austere styles along completely individualist lines...

...It is in the celebration and elucidation of abstract art, after all, that the idea of esthetic autonomy has won a kind of popular respectability...

...But it is, of course, the various schools of non-objective art which, logically, should lend themselves most appositely to this formal mode of apprehension...

...The personal would be suppressed, and a new classicism would be born...

...Not only portraits, but even still life, often the most "abstract" of representational subjects, requires an appreciation of its psychological—sometimes even of its sociological—elements before it can be wholly understood...

...Theirs is a purely hedonist art whose formal circumspection represents, not a social ideology or any transcendental desire to reconstruct reality, but only a particular esthetic option among the many such options now available to them...

...The theory, if valid, should apply to the whole of one's experience with pictures, but in practice it applies less well to some styles than to others...

...It was considerably strengthened when Suzanne K. Langer gave it its most persuasive philosophical statement in her book, Feeling and Form, and it has remained the abiding belief of Clement Greenberg, Fry's principal successor in this country...

...The social idealism that produced the Russian Revolution, and the radical change in our understanding of the relation of matter to energy that derives from modern physics, affected these artists deeply...

...Painting would thereby be reduced, or, if you like, elevated, to its most objectively transmissible elements...

...For me, the real poignancy in an exhibition like the current Janis survey is to be found in the fate of these older artists...

...A belief, verging at times on religious fervor, in the fundamental independence of esthetic expression from the entanglements of extra-esthetic values, whether of a psychological, political or philosophical character, has been one of the principal tenets in the theory of modernism...

...The formal articulation of these elements is just that: a joining together of disparate materials into a new unity, not the obliteration of any one of them...

...Abstract art, in liberating painting from "subjects," has thus manacled itself to the artist's personal development and to the place which that development occupies in the art-historical continuum...

...Most important perhaps, it appears to form the basic assumption, if not always the stated purpose, of many of the most influential artists of our time...

...To say this is, admittedly, to suggest a paradox, for "formal qualities" are what abstract art seems to be exclusively composed of...

...The final irony of this collapse is that our official modernist ideology should invite us to look upon these pictures as autonomous forms, having no expressive import beyond the visual components of which they are composed...

...The geometrical school of abstract painting, and specifically the work of Mondrian, sought to base itself on forms and procedures of so objective and impersonal a nature that the artist's individual signature, in the psychological as well as the stylistic sense, would no longer count...

...Paintings that utilize complex iconographies, that draw upon literary, religious or erotic materials for an essential part of their expressive purpose, can never be fully apprehended by means of formal analysis alone...

...Yet even art of this persuasion cannot, it seems to me, really be entirely grasped exclusively in terms of its formal qualities...

...The expressive burden of painting would thus be shifted from the invention of forms to their pure relations, a shift made possible by narrowing the repertory of pictorial materials to those minimal few—in Mondrian's case, the exclusive use of the right angle and pure primary color—which seemed most immutable...

...To understand an abstract painting, it is as necessary to know who painted it, and when, as it is to know something of the religious symbolism that figures in a medieval altarpiece...

...The peculiar atmosphere of esthetic sublimity and historical defeat, of idealism turned into isolation and accommodation, that hovers over their work imparts to it an emotion more akin to that of the refugee and the exile than to anything having to do with the classical spirit...

...Together with the pictorial inventions of Cubism, which seemed, to their eyes at least, to reflect these developments analogically and to make possible an even more audacious application of their principles to a new socially-oriented and scientificallyminded visual art, the social and scientific upheavals of their time stimulated a desire for a kind of impersonal, universally intelligible style that could legitimately be regarded as classical in spirit...

...And the artists associated with the original Bauhaus program—Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Max Bill—were likewise caught up in an essentially socialist aspiration...

...Out of their lofty ideals, the pioneer artists represented at Janis' effected radical changes in pictorial expression...

...But one has only to walk through the very large and elegant exhibition which the Sidney Janis Gallery has lately mounted under the title "The Classic Spirit in 20th Century Art" to see how completely the personal, the individualist, and also the romantic and eccentric, have triumphed even among those artists most committed to the suppression of precisely these impulses...

...It was a noble dream, if not perhaps the most emotionally fecund dream to which modern art has aspired...

...Subsequent political events separated these artists from the possibility of pursuing such a grandiose course...

...The fact that the work of these artists currently enjoys an unprecedented prosperity on the art market should not be allowed to disguise the fact that the terms of this prosperity represent a nullification of the values upon which their art was founded...

...Within its self-imposed limitations, the exhibition displays an absolutely dizzying range of formal invention, technical virtuosity and sheer visual glamour...

...The idea was given its passport into polite conversation by the English art critic Clive Bell, who coined the term "significant form" as a touchstone of artistic quality, and it underlay the critical writings of Bell's friend and fellow mandarin of the Bloomsbury group, Roger Fry, who was probably the greatest critic of the visual arts in our century...

...THE exhibition, consisting of 55 paintings, sculptures and constructions, is a very beautiful one...

...It offers works of exemplary quality by some of the most gifted and dedicated artists of the last five decades: Arp, Brancusi, and Gabo, among the sculptors...

...Artists such as Malevich, Lissitzky and Gabo forged their styles out of a unique conjunction of political, scientific and artistic events...

...The younger artists in the Janis exhibition are completely untroubled by any such socialist, or even social, preoccupations...

...And there is an interesting line of development traced from the early pioneers of the European avant garde to artists on the current scene, both in Europe and America, who have adapted the conventions of this socalled "classical" style to the new interest in what the catalogue calls "retinal play" and "optical dynamics," which are currently very much in vogue both in "classical" and free-form varieties...

...One of the principal modes of abstraction—and the only one, perhaps, to have produced, in Mondrian, a genius whose oeuvre can be seriously compared to the masters of the past—derived its momentum from a profound attempt to confront and overcome precisely this obstacle of the personal...

...Lissitzky, Malevich, and Mondrian himself, among the painters...

...This radical dependence on the personal was recognized (and resisted) very early on in the history of abstract art...

...But of impersonality and of anything remotely resembling the classical spirit, there is very little trace...

...Their heirs have now succeeded in adjusting their discoveries to the values of a spoiled, esthetically over-fed public for whom such formal austerities are a piquant taste and an intellectual novelty...

...Mondrian, too, in moving from his earlier theosophist mysticism, itself an attempt to escape the merely personal for something more universal, to the socially-minded ideas of the De Stijl group, allied his style with a philosophy of social and technological reconstruction...

...If the work of these artists was in any sense classical in spirit, it was a "socialist classicism" to which they aspired...