Abstract, ‘Abstract’: Modernist Visual Art

In surveying the discourse on abstraction in the writings of modernist painters, and of critics such as Barr and Greenberg, this chapter discerns the regular scare-quoting of ‘abstraction’ as a term only for a new formal language of painting, and the effort instead to denote a more complex yet authentic abstraction. In writer-painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and in theorists such as Worringer, this abstraction is closely associated with an affirmative revaluation of the inhuman and the inorganic as forming the basis of human art and its utopian potential. This case is developed in an extended comparison of what abstraction meant for Cézanne and for Barnett Newman. A pivotal transformation in the meaning of abstraction is identified in Cézanne’s private letters, the only real source of his writing; in Newman, who by contrast sustained a voluminous campaign of published writing in the name of abstraction, a constant struggle in language to extract a new intellectual abstraction from a field of existing meanings and contradictions is observed. For both, an abstraction of the Lyotardian sublime beyond humanism, whether in writing or in painting, figured an intellectual complexity that could be held in common, rather than as the preserve of the academy.