Abstraction be damned: how art loses its shock value

CULTURE SHOCK:In 1896, the young Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who had just settled in Munich, happened to see one of his paintings lying on its side in the dim light of dusk. He couldn’t see what the painting represented but was nonetheless captivated by its forms and colours. The thought struck him that his paintings did not in fact need to represent anything at all, that pure form could be potent in itself. It is a notion so commonplace now it is hard to grasp how startling it was.

Just after New Year in 1911, Kandinsky went to a concert by the avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg. The atonal music hit him with such force that he went back to the idea that had struck him 15 years previously. He drew rough chalk sketches of the concert. They’re on display in the blockbuster exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, at MoMA in New York.

In the first, it is entirely obvious what the image is “about”. We can see Schoenberg at a grand piano and a row of people sitting listening to him. The second sketch is cruder, a childlike scrawl of basic forms, but it is still a representation of the concert.

And then Kandinsky made a third image, a large oil painting called Impression III (Concert). If you had seen the sketches, you could tell what it is “about”. Otherwise, only the title gives a clue. The piano lid has become a big smudge of black paint; the listeners are elongated forms that could be anything – fingers? flowers? – but are actually just paint. Most importantly, all sense of the three-dimensional concert hall – and thus the entire European tradition of perspective – is eliminated. What we see are fields of colour – yellow, blue, red, green, grey, white – that draw attention to the brushstrokes with which they are applied. The painting no longer refers to anything except itself and the process by which it was created.

Revolutionary

Because we’ve learned to see such work as art, it is fascinating to be reminded, in the MoMA show, just how revolutionary an idea it was – and of how rapidly it took hold. It took no more than three years for “abstraction” to become a commonplace marker of the western cultural avant-garde, not just in painting but also in music, dance, photography, architecture and theatre. By the outbreak of the first World War, abstract art was the international style.

In one sense, the very rapidity of the spread of abstraction might seem to suggest it was not quite as new as it appeared. After all, much pre-Renaissance art is abstract – look at the Irish tradition from the spiral patterns at Newgrange to the dazzling convolutions of the Book of Kells. Equally, 19th-century landscape painting had been evolving into images that seem to be almost pure form. You have only to look at some of the glorious Turner watercolours at the National Gallery of Ireland to see that the idea of the painting as a mirror held up to nature was already dying.