Abstraction and Expressionism

Abstraction and Expressionism: The precise meaning of these two terms has been variously defined in order to describe and label various movements in the history of modern art. But generally speaking, Abstraction refers to a technique for presenting a subject in a way that transgresses the conventions of realism, thus yielding a portrayal of the subject bearing little or no resemblance to any person, object or scene as it is found in nature. Expressionism, in the broadest sense, refers to an artistic attempt to express an emotional or psychological dimension of experience, rather than simply to render an objective representation of the artist's immediate impressions. The terms Abstraction and Expressionism here seem very nearly synonymous with each other, or at any rate, mutually implied by each other. Yet, however tempting it is for us simply to equate these two concepts, we should bear in mind the fact that abstraction and subjective expression have been conceived in different ways over the course of the 20th Century, and that each conception has resulted in a different school or movement in modern art. Accordingly, we are now able to describe and classify the uniquely abstract and expressive characteristics of Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Suprematism, and so forth. However, while there is an abundant variety of artistic approaches towards abstraction and subjective expression, a brief consideration of just three of these approaches will suffice here to give us a general understanding of these two concepts and their role in modern art.

The beginning of abstraction and expressionism in modern art can be traced back to German Expressionism. Flourishing during the first three decades of the 20th Century, German Expressionism can best be described as a profoundly psychological approach to art. The artists working in this movement organized themselves into two different camps, or schools, and these schools christened themselves "Die Brücke" (The Bridge) and "Der Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider).

Painters in the Brücke school were primarily interested in figurative art, and only secondarily concerned with developing specific techniques for artistic abstraction. That is, these artists took recognizable figures (e.g., people, objects, etc.) as their starting point, and then made use of these figures as occasions for expressive outbursts of feeling, outbursts that somewhat distorted the literal rendering of their still-recognizable figures. In their works, the Brücke painters thus sought to demonstrate that the expressed inner life of the artist is the product of his or her encounter with certain sensuous objects within the real world. An encounter with real persons or objects thus came first for these painters, and this encounter then served as the basis for the highly subjective, emotional reactions that they incorporated into their work by means of abstraction. For these painters, abstraction was accordingly a technique that one could apply to a literal figure so as to overlay it with a visual record of the highly charged emotional and psychological expressions prompted by that figure.

Kirchner's Two Women in the Street (Brucke)

Kandinski's Flood Improvisation (Blaue Reiter)

Painters in the Blaue Reiter school, by contrast, sought to diminish, and in some cases entirely to eradicate, the figurative basis of expressionistic painting. The Blue Rider painters, under the leadership of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, accordingly sought to liberate art from its conventional task of minutely copying nature, or objectively recording the artist's precise perceptions of the world. Instead of copying forms and figures found in nature, the artists of the Blue Rider school attempted to discover a language of self-expression, a language made up not of words, but of abstract combinations of lines, colors, shapes, and patterns. This abstract language would, in theory, convey the precise emotional state of the artist to the viewer of his or her work. As Kandinsky explains in his 1912 treatise, On the Spiritual in Art, his school is not so much trying to invent this expressive language of abstraction. Rather his school is simply trying to uncover the expressive language of painting that has lain dormant in the medium, remaining hidden behind the representational imperative that has shaped all thinking about art from the Renaissance up to the 20th Century.

While there are still sometimes vestigial remnants of figural representation in the vaguely recognizable objects portrayed in the work of the Blue Rider artists, the figures rendered there are considered to be incidental and of little importance in terms of the meaning of the work as a whole. Instead, it is the abstract and combinational language of color, shape, line, and pattern that effectively conveys the expressive content of their paintings. While the artists of Die Brücke conceived of abstraction as an expressive technique that could imbue literal figures with emotional content, and the artists of Der Blaue Reiter conceived of abstraction as an expressive language that is potentially detachable from all literal figuration, another group of artists came to conceive of the relation between abstraction and expressionism in a completely different way. This group of artists came to be known as the Abstract Expressionist school.

Abstract Expressionism arose in America during the late 40's, and for more than a decade it prevailed as the dominant artistic movement in this country. Drawing heavily upon the Freudian idea of "free-association" (in which the patient freely rambles on until her non-sequitur remarks suddenly reveal her unconscious fantasies) and upon the Surrealist practice of "psychic automatism" (in which the artist free-associates with a pen or paintbrush instead of a monologue), the Abstract Expressionists developed a much more radical sense of abstraction and its possibilities. These artists approached their canvases with passionate strokes, spatters, and smears--all in the belief that the act of painting itself was the only truly expressive aspect of their work. The expressive content of their work thus emerges from a direct engagement with the materials and tools of painting. In contrast to the German Expressionists (of either school), the American Abstract Expressionists felt that nothing at all--neither the representation of literal figures, nor the codified language of abstraction--should intervene between the artist's inner passion and the simple act of marking a canvas. Instead, their storms of passion were let loose with little or no conscious thought given to representational conventions or theories of communication.

Pollock's Mad Moon Woman (Abstract Expressionism)

The idea was simply to apply paint with as much feeling as one could muster. Only later, if at all, would the Abstract Expressionist artist try to interpret the content or meaning of what he or she had produced during such fits of creativity. Thus, in the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning, abstraction refers to a state of mind at the moment of creation, as much as it refers to the strong subordination (de Kooning), or even eradication (Pollock, Rothko) of literal figuration. Unlike their German Expressionist predecessors, these artists did not paint representations of their feelings using the technique of abstraction; instead they simply acted out these feelings with abstract gestures made up against a canvas. To summarize this (too brief and, alas incomplete) history of modern thinking about abstraction and expressionism: we have examined three different takes on the nature of abstraction and its capacity to express inner experience, or feeling. For the artists associated with Die Brücke, abstraction was something that could be added to a painting that is essentially figural in order to imbue it with a heightened degree of feeling. For the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter, abstraction was something that could be codified into a language capable of portraying feeling even more directly, without any recourse to literal figuration. For the Abstract Expressionists, abstraction amounted to a total release, both from the representational conventions of figure painting, and from the codified, quasi-linguistic systems of compositional arrangement and combination.

All of this naturally leads us to ask the obvious question: so who has it right? Die Brücke? Der Blaue Reiter? or the Abstract Expressionists? The answer is, of course, that all of them are right. This becomes clearer if we pause for a moment and look over the art itself. The paintings produced by the artists of these three schools all brilliantly illustrate each school's unique claims about the nature of abstraction and its capacity for expressing feeling in different ways. Choosing one conception of abstraction over the others, or simply rejecting all three, only amounts to expressing one's own taste in modern art. But then again, expressing one's own taste is ultimately the challenge and the luxury that art has to offer us.