In the practice of magic, shapes have been a part of its basic language for thousands of years. They represented the great work in alchemy, more commonly known as the philosopher’s stone, which was more of a metaphorical union of opposites for them than a literal object. A formula to achieve the great work from the 1700s reads, “make of a man and woman a circle; then a quadrangle; out of this a triangle; make again a circle, and you will have the Stone of the Wise.” It is this alchemy that abstract art returns us to in its own (post-)modern way. The sort of magic that makes a black square an object of worship, a squiggly line a piece of music, and a red triangle a revolutionary army.
It is with that red triangle that our story starts. I keep an imperious print of El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites on my bedroom pinboard, a Bolshevik propaganda poster from the Russian Civil War that a friend called “the image of the communist world.” Propaganda, one of the most direct forms of communication, speaking in the language of abstraction. When my father first saw the poster on top of my folded clothes as I prepared to move out, he joked that it looked like something I’d drawn as a child. I explained its monumental context, and though he seemed puzzled by my reverence for art praising a society that ultimately failed, he placed the work in its historical context, looked at it with fresh eyes, and he understood my love for it.
The problem is that many don’t understand. Criticism of abstract art ranges from bewildered statements like ‘it doesn’t mean anything!’ to politicised criticism and even violence against these pictures. These range from individual acts of vandalism, like smashing a vase at an art gallery, to societal furore, like the Nazis’ infamous crusade against what they called “degenerate” art. It’s hard to see people disregard the things that mean so much to you, and I want to use four works I love dearly to show what I find so alluring about abstract art. Hopefully, I’ll help you to think about it in a new way, too. To avoid making this my soapbox, and to get the conversation going before I put it to print, I surveyed nine students and interviewed two in person about their own responses to these paintings.
Kandinsky: Composition VII (1913) — Seeing different worlds.
The survey responses are a good introduction to our first piece. I asked my lab rats to imagine themselves inside the painting, and I invite you to do the same. They responded: “nauseatingly wonderful/terrible…It smells of petrol,” “Like falling into a mathematical fractal,” and “how I would imagine people see colours while listening to music [sic].” The last one is particularly insightful, because of its importance to both Kandinsky and to the point I want to make about abstract art in general: it encourages new ways of seeing. Kandinsky, like me, had synesthesia and saw music as colours. This is what made him become a painter in the first place; he abandoned law after going to an opera and being overwhelmed by a new world of colour. If there was no room for abstraction, and the room it gives to the subjective and the personal, would we ever be able to see his hidden world, or would it have to stay private forever? Abstract art encourages us to see with more than our eyes; we can feel a painting’s musical rhythm, smell it, or feel its physical presence. It’s an interpretive exercise, a sort of self-induced synesthesia that I don’t think realism can induce in much the same way. Being autistic, with a poor sense of other people’s emotions in conversation, I find that art helps me understand them better. The aforementioned logic of seeing with more than our eyes extends to speaking with more than our words. To end my love letter to Kandinsky’s Composition VII on this note, I want to include another response to my survey, one that I found particularly touching: “It feels personal now, it feels as though there is something I understand when I look at this painting that nobody else does. There is a connection I have that nobody else has. I feel whole and warm inside.”
Beckmann: Die Nacht (1918-19) — Seeing our shared world differently
There is a valid criticism of abstract art that, through its subjectivity and individuality, it becomes self-indulgent, incapable of commentary on the real world. If art’s purpose is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, can art that means something different to each viewer even fulfil this political purpose? If systems are inseparable from lived experience, then subjective art can still comment on real systems. I do not believe that politics exists in the aether, independently of how it is felt and interpreted. My second painting, Max Beckmann’s Night (de: Die Nacht), painted in 1918, captures this sentiment well. Beckmann was a veteran of the First World War, and while we have pictures, statistics and other, more objective sources on the conflict, his painting reminds me that these figures were actual people. As a historian, I sometimes find myself forgetting that fact, partly because military history is often used as fodder for entertainment through movies, video games and books. I’d reckon the power of this painting lies in the fact that there’s nothing entertaining, nothing glorious, about it. Beckmann portrays violence as he understood it, having experienced it on an industrialised scale: cold, detached, and devoid of meaning. Having Beckmann’s vantage point, imagination in dialogue with a horrific lived reality, helps me both intellectually understand and empathise with this random violence. On the survey, I asked whether that’s a worthwhile goal: why would anyone even want to imagine and paint something so unpleasant? Is real violence not enough? One respondent eloquently wrote that “we have to lay out our incoherencies and inhumanities in all their detail, expose them to the light and watch them vanish,” I think that Beckmann would appreciate this take by another student a bit more than the last one, as it exposes just what he thought about the things he had experienced, which he portrayed without glory through his grimy, dehumanised figures: “technically, there is no point in anything.” Using subjectivity to strip violence of a universalising meaning, the dismantling and fragmenting that abstract art causes is a political act in itself.
Newman: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? (1966-70) – Provocation
Both of the previous paintings occupy opposite poles in the diverse world of abstract art, as a social commentary and as a personal journey, but they share one thing: provocation. The first piece stands against a world that wants to deny the individual, ignore difference, and the second a world that continues to glorify violence. Provocation, through strikes or protests, is how you get things done in our society; it is also how you put the status quo on the defensive: questioning a society’s values forces it to justify them.
The next piece, a series of four paintings, is particularly important in this regard, because its very title is a provocation. There is a power, and this is one that Beckmann, with his grimy palate, Kandinsky, with his synesthesia, and the alchemists of old understood. It is the magic of colour and shape, which with their symbolic power and ambiguity scare people by asking them to do the work of interpretation. Well, then, who is afraid of red, yellow and blue? This question has been answered in the form of vandalism, once by a German nationalist, who interpreted the artwork as a mockery of his flag, and twice by a realist painter who hated abstract art, seeing it as a threat to his craft. Ambiguity is scary, and by trying to resolve it when looking at a piece of work as confusing as Who’s Afraid?, we reveal what we value most as a society. Was it the fear of the imperious colours, or the nostalgic memory of primary school days that struck us first? Or is it our discomfort with what the piece plainly represents, nothingness? So far, I’ve tried to show that the interpretation of art, at least for me, is an act of empathy. Hatred usually comes from fear, and the only way to get rid of fear is understanding. The fact that we try to use violence to remove the discomfort of both ambiguity and of being asked to interpret our reality instead of being spoonfed meaning shows how far we have to go as a community.
Lissitzky: Red Wedge (1919)
Going back to Lissitzky and his red wedges, I remember what I said to my father about this unusual poster: it’s so cool because it uses symbolic language in a way no one had really done before. And what motivated Lissitzky to do so was the fact that he was making propaganda for a society that was meant to be nothing like anything that existed before it. While the grand realism of Renaissance churches, or the more overwrought ones found in Rococo palaces, can and should continue to inspire us, that is not the world we inhabit anymore.
We inhabit a mechanised world, marked by the intensification of capitalism on a scale that we have never seen before. As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin put it, the specialness, or aura, that made these images endearing is slowly fading away, a process that is sure to accelerate with the advent of AI art. Abstract art exists in response to this world, of its technologies of printing and photomontage, and in reaction to its encroachment upon the individual, its worsening of the alienation innate to capitalism. It asks us to experience rather than to consume, to feel discomfort instead of gratification, and most of all, to talk with someone or something we cannot intuitively understand. Through all of these aspects, no matter how much we mock, hate or distrust it, abstract art is the art for our times.