"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" Kirk Varnedoe
Kirk Varnedoe was one of the great conversationalists on art of his generation. Just as David Sylvester was in his time elucidating complex modern art in dialogue with artists, Varnedoe found respite in the answers of exhibition planning for the public. As part of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2003, 'Pictures of nothing: abstract art since Pollock' ruminates on his personal experience with abstraction. As in his earlier revisionist text 'A fine disregard' (1990), you can sense Varnedoe disagreeing with the general analyses of critics and historians. Here, he lights upon a seemingly deceptive question that no serious art writer would consider touching out of fear for the immense knowledge required by the job: Why all these pictures of nothing?
Specifically, he wants to dial up the pantheon of dead art historians and speak directly with Gombrich who delivered 'Art and Illusion' -- a now seminal installation of the Mellon lectures--in 1956, the year of Pollock's death. Like Gombrich, Varnedoe first began to explore themes directly related to his large, thematic Mellon lectures while serving as Slade Professor at Oxford, and writing during other posts along the way. While Gombrich's grandiose inquiry in his Mellon lectures was 'why does art have a history', he did not search for the significance of abstraction, which was at the full height of its production in the 1950s when he was being published. Like Gombrich the sage academic essayist, the professor-curator Varnedoe wants to ask a similarly essential question.
Varnedoe does not envision art history as a progression of formal developments in art. Staring unflinchingly at its bare breasts, he believes that abstract art is yet another milky manifestation of the process of invention in the ongoing debate of art. That conversation was one that kept him enthralled until the end of his life. "Between the vague confusions of individual experience and the authority of big ideas, sign me up for experience first." An obituary of Varnedoe noted, "For him, modern art was like modern life...It was not a religion but a way of experiencing the world." Varnedoe was thoroughly American, yet he was enough of a Francophile to frame his patriotism as a pride in American post-1945 art that emerged from a larger European context. If he had responded directly to Gombrich's 'Art and Illusion', this text would perhaps be called 'Abstraction and Experience', but it is not, and instead we are left with a field guide to abstraction filled with nearly all of the major protagonists post-1945.
Why can't abstraction and illusionism live together happily ever after? With guns smoking, Gombrich distrusted the abstract art of his times and his treatment of topic was dismissive at best. Varnedoe's ideas about abstraction verge on the need to kill off the presence of illusionism in all future art. Both modes played a role in the history of art throughout time; the emphasis in the second half of the twentieth century was decidedly in abstraction's corner. Varnedoe endeavours to see abstraction as a legitimate reflection of artists and their times by asking the pragmatist's questions. Namely, does it work and what do we get out of it? What befalls the reader, however, is the classic confusion of continuity, the larger questions of where has American art come from and where is American art going. Varnedoe understandably--for he agrees with Gombrich on this point--does not want to ask these questions by basing his ideas on some vague notion of art produced by the spirit of the times. Varnedoe wants to you grasp the innards of abstraction as it is, and sense the still-beating heart that produced the art of blank stares.
Although Varnedoe rightly asserts that Mondrian was the greatest abstract artist prior to 1945, he almost entirely avoids the issue of the war, except to reject the notion that the American government and the MoMA were engaged in cultural propaganda exported to Europe. His terse summary on the topic begins its conclusion, " I think that no two people were in more agreement about their dislike for abstract art than Stalin and President Harry Truman. Both of them disliked it a lot." We are left to wonder whether Varnedoe believes abstraction is significantly European, having cross-pollinated budding 1950s American art. When he wants to reassure us of the merits he offers towards the end of the lectures, in the chapter "Satire, Irony and Abstract Art", a literary approach to the purpose of abstraction. "We expect abstraction, perhaps more so than of other art forms, that its intentions be whole, that it be meant earnestly." This is his attempt to hush the naysayers of abstract art who argue that the joke is on us.
Varnedoe realizes the challenges of discussing the breadth of abstraction from minimalism and land art to pop art and its aftermath. Like all great writing on art, his taking-our-hand-and-walking-us-through the art is almost always pitch perfect. If you don't experience this art the way he does, you feel the need to look again. All the while he never in this text leaves the reader in doubt of his real passion for the experience of modern art. His urgency borders on overzealousness at times. "...The less there is to look at, the more you have to look, the more you have to be in the picture." He should know. Throughout these lectures, he is on very familiar ground having staked his career on three major single-artist retrospectives during his tenure at the Modern. Towards the end of the text he returns to home turf arguing that Jackson Pollock's work is critically challenged in the art of both Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, an open-ended précis that covers three of the artists that helped define much of his curatorial legacy.
Varnedoe's death was doubtlessly tragic for art history. Just months after he delivered these lectures, he died of cancer at the age of 57. In his mature writing career he was fully active for twenty years, those that overlapped with his time at the helm of the Modern. His freshness of approach, hunger for the new, and sprightly intelligence was a scene to behold. The best way to evoke the presence that Kirk Varnedoe is to describe one's own experience with the master curator. During the press preview of the Modern's 'Matisse Picasso' show he dispensed with the formalities that Director and other officials began. He strolled to the podium and evoked, in an explosion of ideas, unscripted and directly at the audience, the intense competition with which these seminal artists gritted their teeth. He walked from the podium under a hail of unplanned, and unexpected applause.
Steve Pulimood
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic.
'Pictures of nothing: abstract art since Pollock' by Kirk Varnedoe
Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XXXV: 48.
Princeton, Oxford, 2006
$45.00 / £29.95
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