Anna Moszynska - Abstract Art

Peter Halley, Yellow Prison with Underground Conduit, 1985

Anna Moszynska studied art history at University College London and the Courtauld Institute. She has taught at numerous institutions including the City Lit, the Royal Academy and Tate, and oversaw the development of the first British masters degree in Contemporary Art at Sothebys Institute, London, where she has lectured for many years. She currently teaches in both London and Paris and directs Contemporary Art Talks. She has reviewed for BBC Radio and written widely in periodicals and catalogues. Her books include Sculpture Now (2013), also published by Thames & Hudson.

I would like to thank the late John Golding for his inspirational teaching, and also the multitude of other artists whose names cannot all be mentioned in the confines of this book but whose work has been an ongoing source of stimulation and enjoyment to me. For the first edition, I was indebted to my commissioning editor, Nikos Stangos and team; to the staff of the Tate library; to Christopher Green and Sarah Wilson for their comments on the manuscript; and to Lynne Cooke and Tony Godfrey for their helpful discussions. For the current edition, I would like to extend thanks to Andrea Schlieker; to Roger Thorp and team at Thames & Hudson; to all those who kindly gave illustrations; and to Anne Farrer, Katie Hill, Iain Robertson, Pierre Saurisse and Marcus Verhagen for their valuable comments on new text. Any errors remaining are my own. Thanks also to my family, not least my husband Colin Ludlow for his ongoing support and encouragement as well as editing help in the preparation of both editions. Thirty years on, the book is gratefully rededicated to him.

Abstract art has frequently baffled many people, largely because it seems unrelated to the world of appearances. Like other modernist art, it poses difficulties of understanding and judgment, and calls into question the very nature of art. Unlike portrait or landscape paintings, which are believed to represent the world, abstract painting apparently refers only to invisible, inner states or simply to itself. It thus challenges the spectator and raises puzzling questions: What is this kind of art about? Is it art, or is it mere decoration? What is it trying to say (or do), and how is one supposed to react to it? What criteria can be used to evaluate it? Why did artists during the twentieth century choose to turn their backs on the commonly perceived world, which, after all, seems to have served earlier artists perfectly well for centuries? Is depiction an accurate record of perceived reality in the first place? What is, in terms of art, an accurate record?

In fact, abstract art exists in varying degrees and forms. Some abstract art is abstracted from nature; its starting point is the real world. The artist selects a form and then simplifies it until the image bears only stylized similarities to the original, or is changed almost entirely beyond recognition. This tendency has been evident in the art of many cultures throughout history, but even within the representational tradition that dominated Western art from the Renaissance, artists have always been aware of the gap between depicted image and reality, and of the artists role in transforming perceived reality into art. It was not until the early years of the twentieth century, however, that an abstract art with no apparent connection to the external world began to emerge. This new, non-representational mode provided a thorough-going challenge to the depictive tradition, governed since the Renaissance by the rules of single-point perspective, and during the course of the twentieth century it was refined and developed in a startling variety of ways.

The evolution towards this kind of abstract art did not occur in isolation but was only one aspect of the social, intellectual and technological upheaval that took place at the turn of the twentieth century. From the discovery of X-rays to the development of the motor car, science helped to create very different perceptions of the world. As the artist Fernand Lger declared in 1914, if pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has made this necessary.

Central to the spirit of modernism which this comment reflects was an avant-garde attitude that permeated all the arts. Artists sought new ways of responding to the world around them, sometimes by rejecting it, or by pursuing strategies of dissolution, flux and fracture in place of traditional Western notions of aesthetic unity and wholeness. The search for new strategies led to a more polemically conceptual attitude to art.

The emergence of abstract art also relates specifically to changes that were occurring within painting itself. Most importantly, the advent of photography in the 1840s had initiated a critical re-examination of the artists adequacy in creating a convincing depiction of reality. Eventually freed from the need to recreate external appearances, many artists turned to the depiction of more subjective, interior realities and of emotions. Gauguins advice to paint by heart, for example, suggested that artists draw on their own inner resources an avenue later explored by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, among others.

The smoothly monochromatic qualities of the photograph, combined with the commercial availability of an increased range of paint colours from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and discoveries concerning the perception of light and colour, encouraged artists to focus on those qualities that are essential to painting: colour and surface texture. As the painter Maurice Denis stated in 1890, a picture before it is a battlehorse, a nude woman, or some anecdote is essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Denis statement offered a theoretical rationale that was to be developed and challenged later in a variety of ways. In the meantime, a further factor that opened up new pictorial avenues for artists to pursue was the example of non-Western art, in which spatial perception and artistic depiction were based on different premises.

This book traces the complex and fascinating history of abstract art from the early years of the twentieth century up to the present time. Whatever the difficulties abstract art may have posed when it first emerged, it is widely accepted today as a mode of art that is as viable and legitimate as the representational tradition.

Since the book and this preface was originally published thirty years ago however, the world has dramatically changed, and abstract art has inevitably done so as well. At the end of the 1980s, the world had a radically different geopolitical structure and the internet had scarcely been invented. Besides affecting daily life, social and technological transformations have inevitably also affected the way art is made and how we view it. We live today in a world that generates abstractions. With the right software, an image on the screen can be morphed from figurative to abstract at the press of a key; with the correct printer, the same virtual form can be turned into three-dimensional reality and this can be done by almost anybody.