The Abstract Engine

It must have been a slow news week because the Wall Street Journal gave over space to Terry Teachout for an essay on "The Seductive Lure of Abstraction.”

Teachout takes the occasion of a travelling exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn paintings as an opportunity to muse on why people care about abstraction in the first place. This may be a question that still stumps readers of the Wall Street Journal, and as much as I admire Teachout for trying to answer it, I found his response a little tired. He couldn’t stick to the problem at hand, often wondering away from the subject of painting to dance and music – as if imagery and narrative were really the same thing. Let’s take another go.

Richard Diebenkorn, Yellow Porch, 1961, oil on canvas,70 1/2 x 67 in.

Anyone who looks at a 60’s Diebenkorn ‘landscape’ and a mid-70’s ‘abstraction’ like one of the Ocean Park paintings will immediately recognize how fragile the wall that separates the real form the abstract can be. Why is abstraction framed as ‘seductive,’ as if to succumb to it is to be, in some way, unfaithful to representation?

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #83, 1975. Oil on Canvas, 100 X 81 in.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Realism as we know it didn’t exist until the mid-19th century when certain artists started to portray subjects familiar to the growing middle class and to cater to that audience’s interests (which often included a voyeuristic interest in poverty and hard circumstance)…things that seemed ‘real’. Compared to what? To the religious and historic subjects supported by the patronage class of the late 18th century, of course. Concurrently, many artists of the late 19th and early 20th century were drawn to abstraction by growing certainty that painting could be like music – that it didn’t need to refer to stories to be moving, that it could be beautiful based on its own formal properties. The fact that such views constituted a shift from the previous generation – a means of making two generations distinct from one another and thus creating a new market where none had existed before – seems like something no one wants to address. One sometimes wonders if the imperative to ‘make it new’ wasn’t really motivated by a horror of being seen as old…

But painting has – even when it carried water for its political or religious sponsors – always been driven by an abstract engine. One need only think of the legendary battles of skill between ancient Greek artists over who could paint the thinnest line. Or of Leonardo’s advice to seek the landscape imagery in stains and shadows on the wall. A hundred examples could be offered, and I invite you to add yours to the comments.

An artist like Richard Diebenkorn (or, for that matter, his mirror image Philip Guston) who slides across some perceived barrier between real and abstract ought to remind us of how entwined those things are – how artificial our ideas of reality actually are and how abstract the world actually is.

What makes Diebenkorn’s paintings worth talking about is their quality of specificity – of being so certainly about something that words seem to fail. (Teachout takes up the wordless defense that is so tired…artists are always saying that their works are outside of language. Such artsits should read more to see what people who use language can do with it…there’s a difference between something being beyond words and being beyond my words...) In Diebenkorn’s pictures, that sense of specificity comes in part from the way the artist reveals the process of making the picture. One sees lines drawn and drawn out, colors scumbled over colors, as if each decision were being made and then questioned. As if something had been seen and then recognized as mistaken…the pictures depict a world of second- and third-guesses.

When I go to see Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings at the Corcoran, it won’t be to cast a vote for the real or the abstract. I will go because the paintings show me how false such a division is, and how much of the world they allow me to see.