Non-figurative Art Research Articles

Art and micro-cosmos: kinetic art and mid-20th-century cosmology

Recent work by cultural geographers on visual art has emphasized performative and participatory aspects focusing upon the embodied and multi-sensory experience of encountering and being part of a work of art. Research on non-figurative art has much to offer in elucidating the relationships and distinctions between representation, non-representation and abstraction. Non figurative artists were representing or enacting a new kind of materiality, one that was putative, in process and ever changing. That materiality was based upon the adoption of a mid-20th-century cosmology and inspired by recent advances in the understanding of matter and the universe. Kinetic art, which is characterized by a set of abstract aesthetics that represent or reproduce real or illusory movement, was, especially in the post-war period, inspired by this new cosmology. Mid-century kinetic artists created non-figurative abstract models of the latest understandings to bring their associated energies, forces and motions to the senses of the viewer-participant. The models that kinetic artists produced in a variety of media were designed to be experienced in an embodied manner rather than simply viewed. These and other models of a mid-century cosmology signify a period in which the practices of representation were shifting significantly and consequently demand our attention.

The Essential Dialogue: A Norwegian Study of Art Communication in Mental Health Care

This study focuses on how semi-structured art dialogues can be used to communicate with older patients with impaired mental health. The study was conducted on a geropsychiatric ward at a university hospital in Norway. To communicate with the patients via works of art, health professionals used semi-structured art dialogues; data were collected by qualitative methods. The findings are based on verbatim quotations regarding the health professionals' experiences of their communication with the patients. Two main categories were identified: the physical domain and the caring domain. Dialogues about figurative as well as nonfigurative art forms were found to stimulate and evoke memories; for some patients, these dialogues were an essential step in creating well-being as well as more-being.

The Empathetic Apprehension of Artifacts: A Husserlian Approach to Non-figurative Art

AbstractIn his Ideas II, Husserl interprets the apprehension of cultural objects by comparing it to that of the human “flesh” and “spirit.” Such objects are not just “bodies” (Körper) to which a sense is exteriorly added, but instead they are, similarly to human bodies (Leiber), entirely “animated” by a cultural meaning. In fact, this is not just an analogy for Husserl, since, in several of his later notations, he comes to show that cultural objects are actually understood as such by means of an apperception employing empathy, as sediments of subjective acts and performances. Understood as cultural objects, images also point towards a previous subjective doing, and it is precisely by grasping this “pointing” that we comprehend them in their proper significance as artifacts. In my paper, I would like to explore the nature and forms of this empathic “pointing,” focusing on the possible use of Husserl’s conception for an interpretation of non-figurative art.

„A mi kultúránk nem lehet más itthon, mint külföldön.” Kassák Lajos 1960-as párizsi kiállítása

Abstract The study presents a case that can be taken as a model of the political conception of the publicity of art in post-1956 Hungary. It is related to Lajos Kassak, the emblematic figure of progressive Hungarian art from the 1910s, who was tolerated by the Kadarian regime as a writer but rejected as an artist. The paper explores the problems of presenting Hungarian art abroad from an angle of art policy. In February 1960 a noted gallery owner in Paris, Denise Rene wished to exhibit Lajos Kassak's works. According to regulations, the permits of the Ministry of Culture and the Hungarian National Bank had to be obtained for the transportation of the pictures abroad. The Bank permit covered both taking the pictures out of the country and selling them. The process of obtaining permission was administered by the Hungarian National Gallery, as no private person was allowed to exhibit abroad without an institutional background. Kassak being a universally respected personage of the Hungarian art scene, it appe...

Topographies of Anti-Nuclear Art in Late Cold War Los Angeles

With the tenth anniversary of the end of the Cold War drawing near, museums around the world mounted exhibitions that focused on the cultural aspect of the conflict. From the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art , almost all considerations of culture in the Cold War focus on the first two decades. The periodisation of these exhibitions reflects the dominant trend in scholarship, which centres on the years in which the slow simmer conflict experienced frequent flare ups. Studies of Cold War culture take one of two tacks, exploring the impact of the bomb on manifestations of culture, such as art, literature and film, as well as fashion, design, and everyday aesthetics. Another school concentrates on the ways that high art was pressed into diplomatic service during the Cold War. This narrative strand ties the formalist concerns that dominated aesthetics to the zeitgeist of the Cold War. Since very little political content could be imputed to non-figurative or non-realist art, the story goes, this art made the perfect expression of American culture for use by cold warrior administrations. In recent years, both accounts of culture in the Cold War have received considerable elaboration in some finely wrought studies. However, the focus still remains on the 1950s and early 1960s, with the rare work moving past the Cuban Missile Crisis. The influential historian of the Cold War, Charles S Meier, divides the long conflict into eight epochs. The lengthy period of dormancy in the 1970s, which Meier characterizes as 'domestic reform and detente' resulted in a decline in the Cold War cultural battles. It also coincided with the fading of the first wave of anti-nuclear activism, as Paul Boyer has persuasively demonstrated in his analysis of the trajectory of anti-nuclear protests. By the 1960s, the American public had lost interest in the issue.

Aubrey Williams

Leon Wainwright is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, Visiting Scholar at the Yale Centre for British Art and on the editorial board of the jour...

Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists

Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists

Ornament and abstraction: the dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary art

The importance of ornament in the emergence and development of abstract art has long been underestimated. Pioneers like Kandinsky and Mondrian looked upon it as a sin in which abstraction should not indulge. Ornament, with its history dating back thousands of years in all world cultures, was secreted in the development of modern nineteenth-century painting, but surreptitiously began to influence abstract art as a formal and methodical element. This book is an in-depth study of this major theme in twentieth-century art history. The catalogue features four artists who help to highlight the role of ornament in the history of art: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Frank Stella. The study begins with the innovative pictorial conception of Philipp Otto Runge, whose early nineteenth-century paintings featured the last genuine form in the history of ornament, the arabesque. The arabesque was influential in Symbolism (Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin) and Jugendstil (Henry van de Velde, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann), and on painting's move towards abstraction (Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Adolf Hoelzel). It is argued that this resulted, on the one hand, in a non-figurative, geometric structure of lines (Mondrian), and on the other, in the swirls of Matisse and Jackson Pollock. Side by side with the royal way of Cubism, arabesque abstraction therefore opens up a second doorway to the world of non-figurative art. In addition to this line of enquiry, the authors examine theoretical findings on the theme of ornament, and what it reveals about the relation between abstraction and figurative art (Malevich, Kandinsky, Paul Klee). Significant influences also result from modern artists' preoccupation with exotic ornamentation found in distant cultures: Matisse & the Orient and Oceania, Ad Reinhardt & Asian culture, or American painting & pre-Columbian ornament (Josef Albers, Barnett Newman). In also considering Minimalism, new media, digital technology, the Renaissance and the Rococo, the book celebrates the impact of ornament on abstract art, as well as showcasing a remarkable array of masterpieces.

Displaying the marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and surrealist exhibition installations

How the exhibition spaces of anticipated installation art. in its late phase often abandoned neutral exhibition spaces in favor of environments that embodied subjective ideologies. These exhibitions offered startled viewers an early version of installation art before the form existed as such. In Displaying the Marvelous, Lewis Kachur explores this development by analyzing three elaborate Surrealist installations created between 1938 and 1942. The first two, the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme (1938) and the Dream of Venus at the New York World's Fair (1939), dealt with the fetishization of the female body. The third, First Papers of Surrealism (1942), focused not on the figure but on the entire expanse of the exhibition space, thus contributing to the development of nonfigurative art in New York. Kachur presents a full visual and verbal reconstruction of each of the exhibitions, evoking the sequence that the contemporary viewer would have encountered. The book considers Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, two artists who are not usually compared, within a common framework. Duchamp specialized in frustrating the spectator, using his ironic wit to call into question the definition of the work of art. Dali was a master at disorienting the senses by establishing and then undermining everyday spatial and object properties. The Surrealist challenge, as voiced by Andre Breton, was to evoke the marvelous. Duchamp and Dali extended that challenge to the physical and commercial realm of the exhibition installation.

Painting as Process and Result

The author reviews both the historical contribution of abstract expressionism in which the technique of action painting is employed and visual perception as it applies to a basic appreciation of nonfigurative art. This is followed by a discussion of his paintings in which he combines the traditions and techniques of American abstract expressionism and Byzantine and Russian iconography using a combination of action painting and precise brushwork. The author associates his paintings with ‘polyvariant’ musical compositions and compares the appreciation of paintings to that of music.

A Memoir on the Work of a Painter in India

The painter traces the development of his work in his native India from his childhood depictions of his immediate surroundings to his present-day semi-abstract symbolical expressionist paintings that reflect his emotive reactions to his milieu. He also discusses the relevance in his development of modern Indian art ranging from the works of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1900), who introduced Western schools of figurative drawing and oil painting, to those of his contemporaries who have been influenced by Western non-figurative art.

A View of Non-Figurative Art and Mathematics and an Analysis of a Structural Relief

The author discusses some interpretations of the term mathematics and what can be meant by mathematical abstract or non-figurative visual art. He then presents an analysis of the mathematical content of his structural relief entitled ‘The Nine’—Hommage a Khlebnikov, which he made in 1976. The mathematical notions employed are from the domain of combinatorics.

On the Development of My Non-Figurative Paintings and Constructions

Although visual art has been my main means of expression, my studies in secondary school were biased towards the natural sciences. I found that they stimulated my imagination and I gained a respect for scientific methods. I concluded that the culture in which we live is generated largely by the work of scientists and technologists and it is to this aspect of culture that I respond as an artist. It is, however, to Mondrian that I owe my awakening to the possiblities of non-figurative art. A great fillip to my early work as a painter came from the reading of popular texts on visual psychology and other subjects that help one to bridge the rift between art and science. Thus I became interested in form in its own right, as opposed to my earlier view of form as being suggestive of function or purpose or the individual materialization of Platonic stereotypes. This new attitude I expressed in hard-edge non-figurative paintings, where an illusion of space by means of perspective is eliminated but the figure-ground ambiguity described in Gestalt psychology [1] is exploited. The compositions consist of interwoven bounded areas, each of which can be interpreted as constituting the background to the remaining areas. In my later hardedge paintings, areas are grouped together to reduce the figure-ground ambiguity (Fig. 1). At this stage, I became dissatisfied with painting on a flat surface and I began to make reliefs and freestanding constructions in which single forms were given physical independence of others in a group.

On Introducing Art into the Design of Traffic Lights

It is obvious that the appearance of both business and residential sections of cities at present is primarily controlled by economic rather than human considerations. Furthermore, the tone of the appearance of business sections is set by visual advertising. Sometimes architects in residential sections sacrifice the needs of man to the decoration of nature. I strongly feel that such aberrations should not be allowed in cities of the future. The above comments refer to the exterior appearance of cities. When one turns to modern fine art shown in cities of many countries one finds that non-figurative art in traditional media is broadly presented, in spite of the fact that the general public has as yet not found such art congenial. Perhaps kinetic art will be better received in view of the popularity of the cinema and television. However, I find that much of kinetic art still has bourgeois overtones, that is, it is conservative. What I feel we need is messages of ethical content for social collectives. After the long period of evolution of living matter on the Earth, we find that man has become the most powerful force controlling nature because he is able to reason. Human desires frequently conflict with the balance of nature and now we find that in many parts of the world man has not used his reason well, for nature is being despoiled. It appears that man began to make objects, which we call art objects, for magical and decorative purposes after he learned to use tools. These objects were based primarily on macroscopic aspects of nature and reached a high degree of accurate representation during recent historical times. There was a strong interplay between various ways of making art objects and technology but during the past century the impact on art of rapidly expanding scientific knowledge of nature and of man, and technology has been especially noticeable. Man has learned to control nature to the extent of using the energy of the atom, of constructing complex devices to permit exploration with instruments and with men of extraterrestrial space and of celestial bodies of our solar system, and of successfully transplanting internal organs in men and animals. I believe the artist must take into account these

Abstract Art: Its Origin, Nature, and Significance

To define abstract art, which occupies such an important place in contemporary aesthetics, merely as a plastic mode of expression that makes no attempt to seek its own forms among those already existing in reality is to give a very inadequate notion of it. The term “non-figurative art,” which is sometimes used to describe it, arbitrarily restricts its range by stressing as peculiar to it this elementary fact alone and by characterizing abstract art solely as a controversial or even as a revolutionary art, as opposed to traditional aesthetics, which is itself figurative. Abstract art at times has also been called “concrete” or “non-objective” art. All these definitions have as little validity in themselves as those that are made use of in the history of art and are acceptable only at their “face value,” to use the monetary term, because they have no absolute value but merely a conventional one based on the principle of exchange (Baroque, Gothic, Rococo, Cubist). However, they are not to be ignored, since they do express the state of uncertainty, uneasiness, and indecision that afflicts most amateurs and even historians of art in regard to abstract art. At the same time, these definitions also indicate an awareness that we are dealing with a very important and complex phenomenon, enriched by extensive projections into the domain of social psychology, sociology, and probably even metaphysics.