What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)

Abstract

The emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the twentieth century with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of America in the 1950s (Rothko, Pollock, et al.) remains puzzling. Such a great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its radicality. The fact that nonfigurative art, without identifiable content in any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated, eagerly bought, and even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies of banks and insurance companies provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue. Whatever else is going on in abstraction as a movement in painting, it is uncontroversial that an accelerating and intensifying self-consciousness about what it is to paint, about how painting or visual meaning is possible, came to be at issue, leading ultimately to the transformation of painting itself into the object of painting (all issues already in play since impressionism) are at issue. Given that heightened conceptual dimension, one might turn for some perspective on such developments to that theorist for whom “the historical development of self-consciousness” amounts to the grand narrative of history itself. Even if for many, Hegel is, together with Locke, the bourgeois philosopher (the philosopher of the arrière-garde ), he is also the art theorist for whom the link between modernity and an intensifying self-consciousness, both within art production and, philosophically, about art itself, is the most important.

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