Liberation from nature

Dutch painter Piet Mondriaan (1872 - 1944) was one of the first artists who turned towards abstraction, creating canvasses without any direct references to the visual world. He and two other artists: Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935) imagined themselves at the head of a progressive development of painting in general which would bring the art form closer to utopia, as if art was a communal project which had to progress to be able to offer its benefits to the world, as science did. And the pioneers of this vision were the avantgarde of this process, simply by their own claims. These pioneers of abstraction left extensive treatises expounding their views, thus exposing their radical motivations concerning the nature of art and human nature.

As American art critic Michelle Marder Kamhi explains: 1) 

'At root, these painters believed that art belongs to a higher spiritual realm that is completely detached from life. In their view, this other-worldly realm could be represented only by work in which no recognizable objects at all were depicted. Through the use of abstract shapes, color, and line alone, they aimed to represent that realm of "pure spirit"- "untainted", as they saw it, by material reality. Moreover, these inventors of "nonobjective art" expected that their work would help humanity attain the higher plane of reality they imagined. Mondriaan, for example, referred to his work as a completely "New Art" that would nurture a completely "New Man" with an evolved form of consciousness unlike any before. To bring this about he insisted that all subject matter "must be banished from art".

Only if the representation of physical objects were entirely eliminated, Mondriaan argued, could a "pure art" develop that would express the new consciousness toward which humanity was evolving. Malevich and others referred to this newly evolved consciousness as "beyond reason". And they actually believed that it would not only endow them with clairvoyance but would enable them to see through solid objects.'

So far Kamhi.

Currently, two exhibitions celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mondriaan's birth. The BBC Website offers an extensive description of M's art, which underlines the level of intelligence which is necessary to enjoy the decorative patterns enshrined in the holy narrative of modernism's gospel:

Maurice Rummens, academic researcher at the Stedelijk Museum, describes the painting as  "one of the spearheads" of the museum's collection. It signalled a transformation in Mondrian's style – and in painting. Representations of real objects and the use of perspective, seen in the artist's landscapes at the turn of the century and continuing into his cubist period, were no longer modern enough for him. Instead, he turned to pure abstraction to communicate something more ambitious and intangible: the elementary and universal qualities of the cosmos.

As we can ignore the highminded and naive explanations of the three above-mentioned 'pioneers' of abstraction, its imitations of today are a gear upwards.

In reality, M's canvasses do not more than depicting very basic elements of things - their horizontalism or verticalism, which do not in themselves communicate anything about the universal qualities of the cosmos, especially not if we consider that parameters like 'horizontal' and 'vertical' don't exist as soon as we leave the stable earth behind - in the universe there is no up or down, everything is floating.

Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces," Mondrian later explained in a 1937 essay. "They exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'.

How underdeveloped does one need to be to take such utterances seriously? it reads like a child's fantasy.

"Mondrian was a trailblazer, in the sense that he was very radical, and in his concentration on the very essence of the image," says Ulf Küster, curator of Mondrian Evolution, an exploration of Mondrian's modernist journey currently showing at the Foundation Beyeler in Switzerland to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220711-piet-mondrian-and-the-six-lines-that-made-a-masterpiece

If the essence of an image is only vertical and horizonal lines, and the very restricted number of basic colours, how is that something 'essential'? It is simply removing anything that could possibly convey something like meaning or a message. It is like saying that a human being is only and exclusively a collection of cells, and that this description defines the essence. It is a simplistic reductionism born from a very low level of intelligence.

If you remove the ideological nonsense of art as a progressive development, like science, developing along a line where new discoveries mark the points of ever greater - yes, of what? then the only thing that remains, is a decorative way of placing lines, shapes and colors on a flat surface. As such, the density of visual information is low, certainly if compared with other decorative art like Islamitic decorative art, or with symbolic abstract patterns as can be found in architecture where abstraction has a very different meaning.

A work of art does not offer a spiritual experience only because the maker says so, but has to convey its message - whatever that may be - through its own presence. For that to happen, not only certain qualities and symbolism must be embedded in the work, but also a context of metaphorical meaning is needed, in which both the artist and the viewer take part. There is nothing wrong with visual abstraction, but the claims of 'abstract art' with its entire history, claims, pretentions, utopian hysteria, and financial cult, belong to the realm of the unbalanced and immature psyche of uninformed people. These claims do not represent progress, but regression into the primitive, into a pre-art condition, as with children's early attempts at hobby painting.

Mondriaan turned his studio in Paris into a three-dimensional Mondriaan painting, all furniture and objects in the style of his work with only verticals and horizontals and a few basic colour squares, answering his theory that art, reality and if possible: humanity, should be liberated from Nature. In this abstract and absurd space, he was often quite lonely, in spite of regular visits from other groundbreaking minds with whom he could temporally harmonize. A friend thought that he better got a nice, female companion, and got a charming française with a great interest in contemporary art so far that she answered an invitation to visit Mondriaan in his three-dimensional creation. After an evening, sprinkled with wine and highminded conversation about the Spirit and how Abstract Painting would liberate humanity from its bondage with Nature, she left the place and with her hand on the door knob, she looked around again and said: ‘C’est impossible de faire l’amour ici’.

We know that Kandinsky and Schoenberg knew each other and inspired each other. The early abstractionists envied music which was, in their eyes, an 'abstract art'; they wanted to reach a comparable level of abstraction which could in the same time express feelings and ideas. The idea that underneath appearances all the arts shared a common ground, a common field of stimuli, stemmed from Wagner's idea of the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' which fertilized thinking about art in the 2nd half of the 19th century. But that is an entirely different subject of aesthetics and psychology, for which the early abstract 'pioneers' clearly lacked the capacities to understand it, let alone to think it through. These were really silly people, also and especially in comparison to the truly bright minds of the time, like Einstein, Bergson, Wittgenstein, etc. - and of a very underdeveloped artistic talent if compared with real artists like Monet, Debussy, Stravinsky or Proust, Cocteau, Valéry. They did not need spiritual explanations à la Madame Blavatsky to promote their work.

As Mondriaan, Kandinsky and Malevich wanted to 'liberate' painting from the tyranny of representation, Schoenberg wanted to 'liberate' music from the pressures of tonality - from the sophisticated system of interrelatedness of tones in a musical work, the system which had served European art music for more than 1000 years, and which is - through mathematics - deeply embedded in nature. Both were seriously wrong, and opened the doors of their respective fields to the simpletons with ambitions not matched by their artistic talents, because quasi-intellectual ideas had to take the place of natural gifts and artistic sensibility. We see how the destructive influence of such people created havoc in the visual arts and in music, the results of which we can now see all around us.

1)

'Bucking the Artworld Tide; Reflections on Art, Pseudo art, Art Education & Theory', New York 2020, Pro Arte Books