Blurring Boundaries in Art – Lecture 1: Towards Abstraction

Learning Outcomes

  • Develop familiarity with the pivotal movements, groups, and artists active during the 20th century.
  • Situate each movement within its broader socio-historical context.
  • Acquire a broad grasp of the evolving art-historical discourse.
  • Master key theoretical frameworks and specialized terminology used in modernist studies.

Historical & Intellectual Context

  • Industrial Revolution → rapid urbanisation, new classes, technological change (e.g. photography) challenging painting’s mimetic duty.
  • Intellectual backdrop:
    • Friedrich Nietzsche → crisis of belief, the “death of God,” individual will.
    • Charles Darwin → evolutionary theory undermining fixed hierarchies.
    • Karl Marx → class struggle and materialist critique of society.
  • All three shape a climate that prizes rupture with tradition and quests for new forms of meaning.
  • The photograph (e.g. Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, c.1838) visually demonstrates the machine’s capacity to out-perform realist painting, pushing artists toward new tasks (light, colour, form).

The Idea of the Avant-Garde

  • Term borrowed from military usage (“advance guard”).
  • Gustave Courbet’s Despair (1843-45) becomes an early exemplary gesture of resistance to academic taste.
  • Avant-garde artists seek to revolutionise both artistic language and social reality simultaneously.

Formal Developments (Late 19th – Early 20th c.)

  • Pure, unmixed colour (Impressionists, Fauves).
  • Rejection of single-point linear perspective.
  • Embrace of primary geometric shapes.
  • Rising importance of form over subject matter.
  • Increasingly autonomous line.

From Representation to Abstraction: Pivotal Precedents

  • Claude Monet, Stacks of Wheat (1890-91) → serial study of light & atmospheric change.
  • Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples (c. 1893) → planar construction; multiple viewpoints.
  • Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) & Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910) → proto-cubist & analytic cubist fragmentation.
  • Henri Matisse, The Dance (1910) → flat colour, rhythm, and expressive line heralding Fauvism.

Spiritualism, Theosophy & Anthroposophy

  • Theosophical Society (1875, Helena Blavatsky) blends Eastern religions, esotericism, and Western occultism.
    • Key ideas: universal harmony, subtle “aura,” symbolic power of colour.
    • Attracts Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.
  • Spiritualist practices (séances, automatic drawing) encourage artists to trust inner vision over external observation.
  • Rudolf Steiner splits from Theosophy to found Anthroposophy (focus on personal inner development, pseudo-scientific framing).

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944)

  • Frequently proposed as “the first abstract painter.”
  • Early naturalistic works (Summer Landscape, 1888) precede abrupt pivot to abstraction.
  • Co-founds “The Five” (1896): a circle of women artists conducting séances; claim guidance from higher spirits.
  • Primordial Chaos series (1906-07) + Youth #3 (1907) → non-representational biomorphic forms, colour symbolisms tied to Theosophy.
  • Altarpiece No. 1 (1915) envisions spiritual architecture bridging earthly & cosmic realms.
  • Oeuvre hidden from public until decades after her death (instructions to seal works for 20 years).

Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

  • Reads Blavatsky & Steiner; claims synaesthesia (cross-sensory perception of colour & sound).
  • Publishes “On the Spiritual in Art” (1911):
    • Colour and form as direct conduits to spiritual vibration.
    • Pyramid model of cultural evolution; avant-garde artist at the apex leading masses upward.
  • Formal phases:
    1. Impressions → anchored in external motif.
    2. Improvisations → intuitive outbursts.
    3. Compositions → carefully planned large canvases (e.g. Composition VII, 1913; 2\,\text{m} \times 3\,\text{m}).
  • At the Bauhaus, publishes “Point and Line to Plane” (1926) → systematic vocabulary of geometric elements; bridges expression & constructivist rigor (Composition VIII, 1923).

Russian Pre-Revolutionary Milieu

  • Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) journal (1899-1904) champions Neo-Romanticism and Symbolism; important collectors Sergei Shchukin & Ivan Morozov import French modernism to Moscow.
  • Experiments by Lyubov Popova (Subject from a Dyer’s Shop, 1914) and Mikhail Larionov (Glass, 1912) fuse Cubism, Futurism, and folk motifs.

Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) & Suprematism

  • Early Cubo-Futurist works: The Knifegrinder (1912-13) emphasise fragmentation + dynamism.
  • Designs sets/costumes for futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913) → introduces Black Square emblem.
  • 0,10 (Zero–Ten) Exhibition, Petrograd 1915: shows Black Square (1915), Suprematist Composition (1915).
  • Publishes manifesto “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism” (1916):
    • Advocates “supremacy of pure feeling.”
    • Declares painting’s final stage = non-objective forms.
  • Black Square positioned in the corner—traditional site of the religious icon—recasts abstraction as a modern icon of the infinite.
  • Later coerced by Soviet cultural policy; returns briefly to figuration.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) & De Stijl

  • Dutch painter transitions from rural symbolism (The Red Tree, 1908) and analytic Cubism (Blossoming Apple Tree, 1912) to strict geometric abstraction.
  • Founding member of De Stijl periodical (1917) with Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, et al.
  • De Stijl Manifesto I (1918):
    • Opposes “old individual consciousness” to “new universal consciousness.”
    • Advocates destruction of tradition, dogma, individual domination.
    • Seeks international unity in art, life, and culture.
  • Neoplasticism (Mondrian’s term):
    • “Plastic” = forming power of art; proposes a new reality built by visual means alone.
    • Balance of opposites: horizontal vs vertical, colour vs non-colour, dynamic vs static.
    • Works such as Composition in Colour A (1917), Composition with Grid 9 (1919) and Neoplastic Composition (1921) employ only primary colours (red, blue, yellow) + neutrals (white, black, grey).
  • Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44, unfinished) introduces short coloured strips—anticipates post-war kinetic rhythm, echoes NYC jazz culture.
  • De Stijl applications in architecture/interior: van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Hans Arp’s Café L’Aubette (1926-28).

Cross-Movement Connections & Legacies

  • Shared aspiration: reveal higher reality (spiritual, universal, or perceptual) through reduction of figure-based imagery.
  • Colour theory commonality: symbolic resonance (Theosophy) & optical vibration (Modern science of perception).
  • Ethical/utopian dimension: many artists envisage art as catalyst for societal renovation (De Stijl’s universal harmony; Suprematism’s liberation of feeling).
  • Formal minimalism paves ground for later developments:
    • Bauhaus design pedagogy.
    • International Constructivism.
    • Minimal Art (1960s) citing Malevich & Mondrian as precedents.
  • Ongoing debate: Does abstraction escape politics (spiritual interiority) or embody it (avant-garde social project)?

Key Terms & Concepts (Quick Reference)

  • Impressionism: optical study of light, fleeting effects.
  • Post-Impressionism: exploration of structure (Cézanne), symbol, expression.
  • Cubism: analytic deconstruction of form into facets; multiple viewpoints.
  • Futurism: glorification of speed, technology, and violence.
  • Suprematism: supremacy of abstract feeling; non-objective forms.
  • Neoplasticism: Mondrian’s search for universal visual language via orthogonal grid & primary colours.
  • Theosophy: esoteric doctrine of universal brotherhood; spiritual evolution.
  • Anthroposophy: Steiner’s applied spiritual science; education (Waldorf), biodynamic farming.
  • Synaesthesia: neurological condition where stimulation of one sense triggers another (sound–colour links).
  • Avant-Garde: artistically & politically radical vanguard leading cultural progress.

Representative Artwork Dimensions (Selection)

  • Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: 8' \times 7'\,8''\; (2.4\,\text{m} \times 2.3\,\text{m}).
  • Cezanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples: 24\frac{3}{8}'' \times 31''\; (61.9\,\text{cm} \times 78.7\,\text{cm}).
  • Kandinsky, Composition VII: 6'\,6\frac{3}{4}'' \times 9'\,11\frac{1}{8}''\; (2\,\text{m} \times 3\,\text{m}).

Study Tips & Possible Exam Angles

  • Be ready to link formal choices (colour, line, geometry) to stated spiritual or philosophical aims.
  • Compare Malevich’s Black Square with Mondrian’s grids: different claims to finality/universality.
  • Trace the influence of Theosophy across Swedish, Russian, and Dutch contexts.
  • Discuss how technological inventions (e.g. photography) indirectly foster abstraction.
  • Consider ideological tensions: individual expression (Kandinsky) vs collective utopia (De Stijl).