Abstraction’s trajectory

Posted: 01 Nov 2011  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

If Impressionism looks tame to us today, that is because in some respects it was. We associate the impressionists with loose paint, unruly brushstrokes and a new and brighter palette, when in fact they were not the first to do so. Take, for example, the barely disciplined brushstrokes in Delacroix’s paintings of skirmishing Arab horsemen which suggest that the brushstroke itself could embody the feelings of the hand holding the brush. Or the languid landscapes of Daubigny, whose smudged and fugitive brushmarks anticipated Monet and his ilk.

Yes, the impressionists painted out of doors because they were interested in atmospheric effects. Yes, they painted shadows in blue, green and indigo, and yes, they did have a broader and more versatile palette thanks to new scientific developments in paint manufacture. But apart from Manet, who experimented with memorable new compositional relationships and spotlit his figures, and Degas, whose paintings did exactly what a camera does — that is, allow people to meander in and out of the canvas — the impressionists were novel for only one thing, their complete embrace of nondescript subject matter and the everyday — boat sheds, bridges, poppy fields and railway stations, all enlivened by atmospheric shifts.

It was, in fact, the post-impressionists (a name which cleverly sidestepped precise definitions for the sparks that shot out of the impressionist catherine-wheel) who released the painted canvas forever from the expectations of the viewer, such as mathematically correct perspectives, naturalistic colours, stillness, veracity and tonal exactitude. When this release is taken to the furthest expression and all the representational elements are jettisoned, you arrive at the purest geometries of Mondrian and El Lisitsky, the poetic meanderings of Twombly, and the abstract evanescence of Rothko. From here the gestures remove themselves from the canvas altogether, to find their way onto floors or suspended from ceilings.

It is a truism that the abstractionists sought to create a world  — not copy one, and it is also evident that colour and its potential for endless combinations which can excite the retina by their proximity to one another has fixated many abstractionists. Colour, like perfume, can hang around in the mind.

One frost-bitten winter, dad’s younger brother turned up at our house in Canberra in an apricot-coloured MGA. This was 1959. Heads appeared in neighbours’ windows. It was like having a flamingo in the garden. This was an early revelation about the power of colour.

The reader will come across a great deal of colour in this issue. Brett East’s paintings and photographs of his paintings where pure pigment squirts from metal tubes will certainly make retinas dance. The cool intersecting swellings of Marie Hagerty’s paintings, which move towards a kind of biomorphism, will also engage the reader. These are a departure from earlier abstractions which suggested an affection for the brushwork of English painter Auerbach. And while their sinuous forms and outlines suggest a very disciplined brush, their bulges appear to undulate before our eyes.

David Harley’s floor-to-ceiling paintings are animated with streamers of colour unfurling and intersecting in a way the brush cannot achieve — they have been created digitally and attached to the walls of galleries.

Geoff de Groen, a steadfast abstractionist who was written about so admiringly by The Australian’s former art critic Sebastian Smee (who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for art criticism) and who was recently exhibited at the Australian National University’s Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra, also graces our pages. His pigments look as if they have been breathed onto the canvas.

We also feature a more three-dimensional abstractionist who works with unusual and rustic fabrics. This is the fashion designer, Vietnamese-born Alistair Trung, who studied textile design at the University of Technology.

Finally, there is a feature inspired by a recent exhibition Intensely Dutch: Image, Abstraction and the Word, Post-War and Beyond, curated by Hendrik Kolenberg, which reveals the profound influence a group of Dutch painters had on their abstractionist Australian counterparts in the post-World War Two period.