I don t get abstract art but why it matters

I don't get abstract art. I've heard a few people say this over the years. And I mean, yeah, that was once me too. I still picture it in hotel rooms and office foyers. These kind of decorative, disposable pictures. Or the product of an arts and craft afternoon. The idea that anyone can make abstract art. I mean, sometimes it's hard to argue with. So what makes abstract art, art? This whole video was triggered by a show of paintings from Cecily Brown that just opened in London. She's a British painter who came to prominence in the late 90s with a style that has its own name, abstract figuration. It refers to work that teeters at the edge of abstract painting on the one end and figurative painting on the other end. When you first look at a Cecily Brown, it does seem like an overwhelming mess of marks, but they are kind of like those magic eye books. The more you stare into her canvases, the more you realize that there are subjects staring right back at you. There's a term in psychology called pareidolia, which refers to our brain searching for familiar patterns in random visual noise. It's like when you look up at the sky and see things in the clouds. Our brain is constantly trying to find order in disorder. It's a trait that evolved from our need to spot predators in the wild plains of the savannah. The phenomenon of pareidolia applies to a lot of abstract art. Cecily describes herself as a magpie. She collects images from books, postcards, and even jigsaw puzzles. She repeatedly draws and reproduces those images by hand until they're committed into her muscle memory. And so when she goes to the studio to paint, fragments of these images find their way onto the canvas. And so her paintings fall into this middle ground between abstraction and figuration. Cecily is not the first artist to do this. Seven decades ago, a painter called William de Kooning was part of the so-called abstract expressionist movement. It was a time when artists and critics had declared the human figure to be an obsolete subject in art. De Kooning made a name for himself with these lush abstract compositions inspired by the lyrical freedom of jazz music and the energy of urban New York. But over time, the human figure started to make its way back into de Kooning's work. In response to hearing that it's impossible to paint a face, de Kooning said, well, it's impossible not to, as even abstract shapes must have a likeness. De Kooning paved the way for paintings to have both literal and non-literal elements. But where did de Kooning get his inspiration from? I think it's time we looked at the history of abstraction in art. For many years, the art world considered Wassily Kandinsky as the pioneer of abstraction. Born in the 1860s, Kandinsky's early paintings were fairly traditional for the time. But it was a lecture that he attended in 1909 that changed everything. It was a presentation on synesthesia, the experience of sound triggering an automatic and involuntary perception of color and movement in some people. This led Kandinsky to think of visual art as a way to communicate these emotional sensations, much like music does. And so his art went from this to this. It's said that this 1911 work is the first abstract painting, followed by these 1913 paintings that contain no reference to the natural world. But this story overlooks one important figure in abstract painting, Hilma af Klint. Klint was a Swedish painter born around the same time as Kandinsky. Like all artists of this period, she was traditionally trained. But as time went on, she delved deeper and deeper into the spiritual world and the occult. She held seances with a group called the Five, which she said helped to communicate with higher beings. And so it was actually Klint who, in 1906, created the first truly abstract painting. It was a translation of spiritual messages that she said she was receiving. While Klint and Kandinsky created the first truly non-representational paintings in the early 1900s, there were hints of the movement forming much earlier. You only need to look at the paintings of the British landscape artist, J. W. M. Turner, to see that he let light and atmosphere overwhelm the natural forms in his work, with many of his paintings from the 1940s hovering at the edge of abstraction. In these examples, abstraction was born inside representation, or as a means to portray emotional energy, in the case of Kandinsky, and spiritual energy through Klint. In 1915, the idea of painting was completely shattered when Kazimir Malevich presented The Black Square. It is, as its name suggests, nothing but a solid black square. The artist said that he wanted to liberate painting from having any function. Well, this is the first time in art history that the idea of, but my kid could have done that, comes into painting. And so it's the point at which talent and effort are divorced from painting. The presentation of The Black Square is an influential moment in art history because it asks whether, if you strip down a painting so far, can it still be meaningful? From this zero hour in 1915, abstract painting quickly starts to rebuild itself. First, you have Piet Mondrian's introduction of neoplasticism, or new plastic art, after the First World War. And artists like Achille Gorky and Jean Miro bridge the gap between these hard-edged abstract forms and more organic, disordered ones. Which leads us to the AbEx movement. The Second World War in the early 1940s had a profound impact on the global art world. It shifted its center of influence from Europe to New York. At this moment in time, as if reeling from the scars of war, abstraction continued to be the And no one was more important in this new order than Jackson Pollock. In 1949, Life magazine rhetorically asked whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States. This was because of his drip paintings, created a couple of years earlier. For these works, Pollock would pour and splash liquid paint onto canvas, resting on the floor of his studio. It was also described as because the canvases became a record of the movement and rhythm of Pollock's body as he moved across the work. What was lost in art history was that Pollock was strongly influenced by the Ukrainian-born artist Janet Sobel, a mother of five and completely untrained, who experimented with applying paint directly onto the canvas from the tube. She created this work called Milky Way in 1945, two years before Pollock's supposed breakthrough work. In this instance, the predominantly male media and critics championed Pollock. He was a hard-drinking, smoking cowboy of post-war America. And so he succeeded, while Sobel did not, to be forgotten to history until recently. Even Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, was innovating in abstract art in the 1930s, long before her husband. But she was eclipsed by Pollock's dominant personality, both while he was alive and in the mythology that was created after he ended his own life in 1956. There were many other important figures in the abstract expressionist movement in the mid-20th century in America, including Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Clifford Still, and also Helen Frankenthaler, who, along with Krasner, defied the male-dominated movement at the time. As another exploration of action painting, Frankenthaler developed this technique of soak-staining canvases. Some people today might call these works ornamental and decorative. It is one of the persistent critiques of abstract art. But I think what's worth remembering is that each one of these artists were creating a new way of painting. Abstraction at this point was almost problem-solving. And, of course, sometimes when a problem is solved, the solution can appear to be obvious with hindsight. But that shouldn't strip away the genius of these artists. So where did this go from the 1950s? Well, the art world started to rebel against the rejection of representation and imagery that had characterized abstract art. Mark Rothko wanted his large, color-filled paintings to be a place where his sadness and the viewer's sadness could meet, and so the two could feel less alone. It was a search for emotional meaning and resonance in painting. Like with Rothko, abstract expressionism was, for the most part, serious, introspective, and characterized by emotional weight. But enter Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and the new movement known as pop art in the 1960s. Pop art was almost the complete antithesis to abstraction in almost every way. It focused on immediately recognizable mass media imagery presented in advertisements, comics, and celebrity tabloids. Pop art was radical at the time because it challenged the idea that great painting had to look spontaneous and soulful. Lichtenstein made paintings that almost looked machine-made, and he borrowed imagery from low-status popular culture. Warhol stripped this down even further by using mass production techniques like silk screening, which let him repeat images over and over again. He even called his studio the factory because he could reproduce works on a large scale. Warhol took commodities, turned them into art, and then commodified that art. From the 1960s onward, abstract art and figurative art forge their own lineages, and neither again becomes unquestionably the future for painting. And this takes us back to Cecily Brown, whose work is tying these two strands together. She almost weaponizes the phenomenon of pareidolia that I discussed earlier, and the human desire and near-biological need to find meaning in images. Another important painter who comes to mind in the second half of the 20th century is the German artist Gerhard Richter. He started his career by painting these sublime photorealistic portraits and landscapes. Uncle Rudy, painted in 1965, is based on a photograph of his uncle, a Wehrmacht soldier, smiling in uniform. It was Richter's attempt to grapple with the dark history of post-war Germany, including his family's own personal history and complicity. These paintings are blurred, much like memory itself. And over the years, Richter pushed the boundaries of this blurring, and much like Malevich half a century earlier, he started to reduce painting into solid blocks of color, or even just slabs of gray. His most iconic works are the Abstract Builder series, which he creates using a large squeegee to drag oil paint across the canvas. The term Abstract Builder is also a contradiction. It translates literally to abstract images, preserving the idea of an image even when representation has all but disappeared. For the rest of Richter's long career, continuing well into the 2010s, he would alternate between creating these photorealistic works and abstract works as an exploration of what painting is and what it can communicate. But I wonder, if Richter had only created these abstract works, would he be as celebrated as he is today? Or do people find comfort in the fact that he is a virtuosic painter who, much like Picasso in his youth, has intentionally decided to free himself in the abstract or figurative? But that goes to the heart of the issue with abstract painting, and it's distrust by some people. I think the problem with abstract art is not that it can be decorative, and not that it can be easy to do, but the best abstract painters are using it to ask important questions. For Kandinsky, like, how can painting convey feeling without depicting anything? For Malevich, how little can remain in a painting before it collapses? For Pollock, can process itself become an image? And for Rothko, how can painting make you feel less alone? Good abstract art is trying to solve a problem, even if it kind of looks like a kid ate too much chocolate and helped himself to dad's art supplies. By the way, that's Cy Twombly, and probably my favorite artist of all time. I can't believe that somehow he didn't even find himself in this video, but maybe the subject for another one. In conclusion, I think we're at a turning point now. Artificial intelligence has commodified the creation of images, but there's no soul behind them. Abstract art may once again become the dominant medium because it explores new visual territory that even we sometimes struggle to comprehend. In an age of AI, when it can produce recognizable images instantly, painting that is harder to automate, like abstract art, may offer a solution. And I think that good abstract art does something that no other type of art can do. It triggers a visceral, emotional response that, to be honest, I find hard to explain. And the seeming irrationality of this reaction is why these works can be so powerful. So this is what I think of when I look at abstract art, and I hope that helps.