Modern Art And The Object

A Century Of Changing Attitudes, Revised And Enlarged Edition

Ellen H. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429708930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book is devoted to a reexamination of modern art from the point of view of the artist's approach to the object. It chronicles the complex, changing relationship between art and the object over the past hundred years; a fundamental organicism relationship as one thing grows out of another.

1
Modern Art and the Object from Nineteenth-century Nature Painting to Conceptual Art

Art criticism, like politics, is plagued by words which mean different things to different people in different places at different times. When the contemporary American artist Mel Bochner says, ‘In the early ’sixties the formula was “art= object”,’ the word ‘object’ is different in meaning and reference from what it was for Picasso, for whom it meant the source object in the visual world which served as the point of departure for art’s inventions. He told Zervos, ‘There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark.’¹ Picasso meant by ‘object’ more what Kandinsky had in mind when he called his abstract painting ‘non-objective’, whereas Bochner was referring to the paintings and constructions of such artists as Frank Stella, Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt as objects. The whole problem is more a question of what is the object, than of what an object is; or one might say it is more a question of where than of what. Is it something ‘out there’ in the external world (a river, a mountain, a haystack); or is it something ‘in here’ (either the artist’s personal vision and his emotional reaction to the external world, or the work of art turned in on itself, focusing on its own properties and processes); or is it something having no visible substance and/or no direct cause-effect relationship to physical reality (a philosophic proposition or similar idea)?

Thus, in considering modern art from naturalism to conceptualism, we speak first of the object as that part of the external world which served as the departure point, the subject matter, for the work of art. Then gradually we switch, with the artist, to thinking about the object as the work of art itself, a tangible thing among things, which ‘lives its own life’, to use Picasso’s well-worn phrase. Perhaps less familiar is a statement he made to Françoise Gilot: One of the fundamental points about cubism is this: not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer in the object. Reality was in the painting.’² Finally, we encounter the widely held contemporary stance that the art object has sunk to the level of a commodity and it is to be spumed by artists. So, the object is dead; but long live the object! Because of course these artists stake out new territory and their new object (meaning either subject-matter or work of art or a combination of both) may be anything from a mathematical theorem to the life cycle of an ant. Throughout all the enormously varied ramifications of the basic usages of ‘object’, there runs, moreover, a hint of its signifying ‘purpose’. A further variant on the use of the word is hardly relevant to the present study, but should at least be mentioned: the object as a matter-of-fact thing, i.e. as the result of an ‘objective’ as opposed to a ‘subjective’ approach. This is what Claes Oldenburg meant when he said that in his happenings he treated the actors and the audience as objects, or what Rainer Crone had in mind when he wrote that in Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedy portraits ‘the emotions of mourning become object’.³

The entire gamut of modern art can be viewed from the vantage point of the artist’s attitude towards the object, an examination which should throw some light on the larger problem of how the modern artist chooses to interweave art and reality and, ultimately, of what constitutes reality for him. In this first chapter, the broad outlines of such an investigation are sketched in; and in the essays which follow, some particular areas of the problematic relationship between art and object are explored in greater detail.

It hardly needs saying that no movement or individual is concerned exclusively with any one phase of that relationship; rather, it is a matter of degree and emphasis. At the risk of falsifying through over-simplification in pursuit of clarity, I shall trace major strains of emphasis as they wind in and out of art history from Cézanne and John F. Kensett in the second half of the nineteenth century to Chuck Close and Mel Bochner in the second half of the twentieth century.

In late nineteenth-century nature painting one can detect three major emphases which will appear and reappear in numerous guises up to the present: I) faithful representation of the visual appearance of the object, i.e. illusionistic or what Duchamp called ‘retinal’ art (the impressionists, Cézanne and that great body of landscape painters here represented by the American, Kensett); 2) revealing and underscoring the materials and process of painting, the art in art (the impressionists, Cézanne, Seurat); 3) exaggeration and departure from verisimilitude to express feelings or ideas (van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne). The fact that Cézanne’s name appears in all three categories, and most of the others in two, clearly points up the dangers and inadequacies of such classifications; but I hope it does not invalidate the attempt to find or make some paths through a very rich and tightly-packed forest of activity. The two essays on Cézanne demonstrate how his art fulfils the multiple requirements for the artist which he himself posited: ‘There are two things in the painter: the eye and the brain. The two must co-operate; one must work for the development of both, but as a painter: of the eye through the outlook on nature, of the brain through the logic of organized sensations which provide the means of expression.’⁴ And again, ‘One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one’s model and, above all, of the means of expression. Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.’⁵ Vision, idea, creativity, feeling are conjoined. Cézanne delineates the structure of his source objects so exactly that one can locate almost the very spot where he set up his easel in painting each of his numerous studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire (i); one can recognize a particular pine tree when it reappears in several pictures, and even propose the date of a watercolour on the basis of the tree’s growth. At the same time, his paintings and drawings are as much objects as the mountain and tree are; but the painted object (oil, watercolour) and the object painted (mountain, tree) vie with each other for dominance. The tension resulting from this conflict adds resonance to the pictorial dynamism animating the relationship of every last little brushstroke to the extremely complex, quietly vibrant whole. Literally hundreds of small opposing forces are brought into equilibrium; but the equilibrium and quietude of Cézanne’s paintings are different in kind from Kenset’s. The latter’s pictures, like Monet’s (2) and most other nineteenth-century nature painting, are more passive in total structure and in detail. Kensett’s idyllic, optimistic landscapes (66) are utterly without tension; you feel no sharp craggy bones in his mountains, no treacherous currents in his rivers and lakes, and even the Atlantic stills its surf for him. One might say that neither did Cézanne paint turbulent seas; however, it is not the depiaion of motion, but the interactivity of the pictorial elements which animates his painting - qua painting, not qua nature. Kensett’s love for nature is more peaceful and he is more acquiescent towards her, whereas Cézanne was never in such easy harmony with nature, art and himself. While he worshipped nature, he insisted on being ‘master of one’s model’; he knew that he was a significant, inventive and courageous artist, but he was never satisfied. In his last year he wondered if he would ever ‘realize the dream of art that I have been pursuing all my life’.⁶ Cézanne’s magnificent struggle and his self-doubt meant almost as much as his revolutionary art did to many of his followers. Even Picasso, who said, ‘Bien sûr!’ Cézanne was his ‘father’,⁷ declared, ‘It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety - that’s Cézanne’s lesson. …’⁸ While Cézanne’s inventions undermined the integrity of the object in relation to other objects and to its environment, and thus readied the ground for the cubist’s more pronounced subjugation of the object, still he steadfastly cherished its identity. Cézanne upset the whole applecart, but he hung onto the individual apple; Picasso and Braque (3) let that slip too, as they (first separately and then together) worked out the kind of formal analysis and vocabulary which came to be called cubism. Here the painting and the process of its constructing shatter the individual object to bits; but the source object, unlike Humpty-Dumpty, can be put together again (see On the Role of the Object in A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Preface
• 1 Modern Art and the Object from Nineteenth-century Nature Painting to Conceptual Art
• 2 The Object Painted and the Painted Object in Quiet Collision
• 3 The Mountain in the Painting and the Painting in the Mountain
• 4 The Painting Freed
• 5 ‘I am Nature’
• 6 Object as Art
• 7 Art as Object
• 8 The Object in Jeopardy
• 9 Women Reshaping the Object
• Notes
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Index