Untangling the Web in Which Abstract Art Began

“A painter, a composer, and a poet went on a road trip,” begins one print advertisement for the MoMA’s new exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925. Although it sounds like the start of an artsy joke (“Two Abstract Expressionists walk into a bar…”), the punchline’s serious: “…and a new art form was born.” An immensely ambitious exhibition, Inventing Abstraction aims at no less than untangling the international web of associations and influences between artists across disciplines that resulted in the paradigm shift from realism to abstraction at the beginning of the 20^th century. From a distance, understanding the inner workings of that network appears as daunting as the exhibition’s diagram above, but Inventing Abstraction will have you peering through the matrix to the surprising truth lurking beneath. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Untangling the Web in Which Abstract Art Began."

[Image: The invention of abstraction was not the inspiration of a solitary protagonist, but a relay of ideas that moved through a network of artists and intellectuals working in different countries and different media. This diagram maps the nexus of relationships among those artists represented in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, all of whom played a significant role in the development of a new modern language for the arts. Vectors connect individuals whose acquaintance with one another in the period 1910-1925 could be documented. The names in red represent those figures with the most number of connections within this group. The chart was a collaboration among the exhibition’s curatorial and design team and Paul Ingram, Kravis Professor of Business, and Mitali Banerjee, doctoral candidate, Columbia Business School. An interactive online version of this diagram can be found here.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, which runs through April 15, 2013.]

Graphic Content: Graphic Art of German Expressionism at the MoMA

“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.” When the German Expressionists searched for a way to get back to basics and recover for the present what they saw as the lost primitive passions of the past, they turned to printmaking and the graphic arts as the ideal medium. In German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 11, 2011, the glory days of German Expressionism, both before and after World War I, live again. The content of these graphic works—life, love, war, peace—inspires, informs, and even offends, but never fails to touch something inside you with the “genuine” force Marc wrote about that “guarantees its truth.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Graphic Content."

[Image: Franz Marc. Riding School After Ridinger (Reitschule nach Ridinger). 1913. Woodcut. Composition: 10 9/16 x 11 3/4" (26.9 x 29.8 cm); sheet: 12 13/16 x 14 3/4" (32.5 x 37.5 cm). Publisher: unpublished. Printer: Maria Marc. Edition: One of an unknown number of posthumous impressions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials for German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs through July 11, 2011.]

A Matter of Interpretation: Is All Art History Western Art History?

It’s human nature to try to understand something new by comparing it to something we already know. We always interpret the present based on past experience. But when we make that interpretation via comparison, are we being fair to the new experience, or the old one, for that matter? “Comparisons are like mercury,” writes art theorist James Elkins in his controversial new book, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, “the big blobs can be cut and divided into little droplets, but they can never be entirely dissolved away. Even the tiniest atomized droplets, which seem so isolated, can be virulent.” That virulence stems from each comparison containing “a microcosm of assumptions,” in this case about how we view Chinese art through the lens of Western art. In Elkins view, the use of Western examples to understand non-Western art, including Chinese art, does a disservice to both fields. Perhaps even worse, the very study of art history itself is incurably Western thanks to the infection of past practice. How then do we ever understand art beyond the Western tradition? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Matter of Interpretation."

[Image: Dong Qichang. Thatched Hall. 1597.]

[Many thanks to the University of Washington Press for providing me with a review copy of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History by James Elkins, with a foreword by Jennifer Purtle.]