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Wild Things: What Was Abstract Art?Barr y SchwabskyFebr uary 19, 2013 | This arti cle appeared in the Mar ch 11-18, 2013 edit ion of The Nati on.

All the marquee names are he re: not only Picasso and K andinsky, but also Malevich and Mondrian, Duchamp and

Lger, Arp and Schwitters, Albers and Lissitzky. They may not have been solitary artists, but thats no proof they

werent geniuses. Some play a bigger role than might be expected. Because Francis Picabia gets routinely associated

with Dada and Giacomo Balla with Futurism, we may not remember them as great proponents of abstraction. This

exhibition tells us otherwise. It also cogently charts the way abstract painting gave birth to abstract sculpturenot so

much because sculptors imitated what painters were doing, but because abstraction drew the attention of painters

toward the tactile substance of their materials, which turned many of them into sculptors.

But as an exhibition on this scale should do, it also offers surprises.

I didnt know that abstraction had found a toehold in Bloomsbury as

early as 1914, when Duncan Grant created a long, scroll-like

Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting With Sound and Vanessa Bell

made several abstract paintingsincluding one, with floating

rectangles of various colors against a yellow surround (now in the

collection of the Tate), that is far more thoroughly reduced, flat and

frontal than anything anyone else, even Mondrian, had made at that

time. Yet Grant and Bell must have found these experiments

unsatisfactory (I certainly do), because they soon returned tomaking figurative art.

Also from 1914 is a striking Chromatische Phantasie (Chromatic

Fantasy) by Augusto Giacometti, cousin of the far more famous

Alberto Giacometti. The very few of his works Ive seen before have

been landscapes and still lifes of a broadly post-Impressionist

stamp, and no more abstract than a work by Gauguin or Bonnard.

But this piecemade, it seems, by roughly dabbing colors onto the

canvas with a palette knifeis not only resolutely

nonrepresentational but also an abstraction of a sort that seems out

of place with anything else in the show, and out of time. With its

confident formlessness, and the way touch and color become one,

Id have guessed it to be the work of a tachiste of the 1950s.

For a contrast to Giacomettis cultivation of the near-random-seeming placement of quite physically distinct bits ofpaint, there are three drawings by Wacaw Szpakowski. Made in 1924, they describe patterns formed by continuous

black lines undergoing incessant movement, though always at right angles: the line is always moving either

horizontally or vertically, but the patterns created include diagonals. If Giacometti is an unheralded precursor of

tachisme, then I suppose Szpakowski plays the same role in relation to Op Art, which makes much of similar optical

effects. But as with Giacometti, whats exciting is not that Szpakowski anticipated a later development; its that even

within his own time, there is something inexplicable about his having done what hes done. Using ideas and

information similar to those of his peers, hes arrived at something that is abstract in the strong sense of remaining

somehow uncategorizable and even, in a deep sense, unknowableabstract in a way unlike anything else in

Inventing Abstraction.

Unfortunately for an exhibition goer who wants to know how Giacometti came to make his Chromatische Phantasie or

why he didnt continue along this line, theres not a word about him in the catalog. In Szpakowskis case, one can

learn from Jaroslaw Suchans contribution that he was drawn to abstraction by his fascination with the mathematical

laws observable in nature and that he developed his work not just in isolation from the Polish avant-garde but in

complete indifference to the art of the time. You might find his drawings difficult to distinguish from the kinds ofmathematical, scientific or even spiritualistic images that Dickerman insists are not art at all because they were

intended to produce meaning in other discursive frameworks. But that is part of what makes his drawings unsettling

and strong. Szpakowski died in 1973, and his works were first exhibited in 1978. The network isnt everything, and

isolation can be necessary even to those who may not quite be geniuses. Szpakowski wasnt concerned, as Picasso

was, with expressing his own anxiety; he was searching for impersonal patterns of universal order. Yet his art was

distinctly personal, with a flavor peculiar to itself. Perhaps this is the great lesson of abstraction: that sometimes it can

overcome its own antinomies.

* * *

For curators, the inconsistencies between an exhibition and its catalog can be hard to overcome. Anyone who has

seen Dickermans previous blockbusters for MoMAon the Bauhaus in 2009 and on Dada in 2006knows that she

is adept at organizing complex exhibitions with scads of material in a lucid way. The same is mostly true here: only the

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About the Author

Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky is the art critic of The Nation.

Schwabsky has been writing about art for the

magazine since 2005, and...

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attempt to integrate music into the story falls flat. However, such exhibitions have a particularly symbiotic relation with

their catalogs, which need to fill in and give perspective to the historical narrative. In this respect, Inventing

Abstraction is a disappointment. Perhaps in deference to her fascination with networks, Dickermans substantial but

fairly succinct introductory essay is followed by thirty-six brief texts on various topics by twenty-four authors (including

herself)not only art historians but luminaries from other fields, such as the composer David Lang and the historian

of science Peter Galison. As a result, there is insufficient mediation between her overview and the multitude of details

it ought to encompass, and which have been parceled out to the various contributors, who do not always agree with

each other or with her.

In her introductory essay, Dickerman seems to take at face value Picassos assertion that his first Cubist paintings

were done more or less as pure painting, and the composition was done as composition, with any identifying

attributes added only as an a fterthought. But in his entry, Yve-Alain Bois refutes this, concluding that Picassos

interlocutor, Franoise Gilot, had either misunderstood the painter or that he had been indulging in some kind of

convenient fib. At times, for that matter, Dickermans introduction doesnt even agree with the exhibition. She ends

her essay with a brilliant stroke, by claiming Duchamps readymades as products of abstraction, and shes rightbut

then why isnt one of them on view? I dont normally think of Duchamp as a great painter, but really, its good to be

reminded that Le passage de la vierge la marie (The Passage From Virgin to Bride; 1912) is as ravishingly painted

as anything in the show. Even so, the inclusion of his Bottle Rack (1914) or his snow shovel, In Advance of the

Broken Arm (1915), would have shown another outcome of his interest in abstraction altogether. Like much of the

best abstraction, those works are at once paradigmatic and almost inscrutably idiosyncratic.

In our July 16-23, 2012, issueshortly after the opening of the new site of the Barnes Foundation

Barry Schwabsky looked at the pioneering collectors of modern art, in Extreme Eccentrics.

Barr y SchwabskyFebr uary 19, 2013 | This arti cle appeared in the Mar ch 11-18, 2013 edit ion of The Nati on.

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