- há 52 minutos
O pintor e crítico de arte Matthew Collings traça a ascensão da arte abstrata nos últimos 100 anos, enquanto tenta responder a uma série de perguntas básicas que muitas pessoas têm sobre essa forma de arte frequentemente enigmática.
Categoria
🎥
CurtaTranscrição
00:00:00.
00:00:00.
00:00:06.
00:00:08.
00:00:08.
00:00:09.
00:00:09.
00:00:11.
00:00:11.
00:00:11.
00:00:11.
00:00:12.
00:00:12.
00:00:12.
00:00:12.
00:00:13.
00:00:14.
00:00:15.
00:00:15.
00:00:15.
00:00:15.
00:00:15.
00:00:15.
00:00:16.
00:00:16.
00:00:17.
00:00:17.
00:00:17.
00:00:18.
00:00:18.
00:00:20.
00:00:20.
00:00:22.
00:00:22.
00:00:22.
00:00:22.
00:00:23.
00:00:26.
00:00:26.
00:00:26.
00:00:26.
00:00:26.
00:00:26.
00:00:27.
00:00:27.
00:00:28.
00:00:29.
00:00:29.
00:00:29.
00:00:29.
00:00:30.
00:00:30.
00:00:32.
00:00:33.
00:00:34.
00:00:34.
00:00:34.
00:00:34.
00:00:34.
00:00:35.
00:00:35.
00:00:36.
00:00:36.
00:00:36.
00:00:36.
00:00:38.
00:00:39.
00:00:40.
00:00:41.
00:00:41.
00:00:42.
00:00:42.
00:00:42.
00:00:42.
00:00:43.
00:00:43.
00:00:44.
00:00:45.
00:00:45Why didn't they be so vague?
00:00:46When they are precise, how would they help?
00:00:50These could seem unanswerable questions
00:00:52but Abstract Art has been around for 100 years now
00:00:56and is an ongoing thing.
00:00:59By exploring the private world of living abstract artists
00:01:02and looking at some key figures from Abstract Art's history
00:01:06am going to show you that in fact there are answers.
00:01:10Amid complicated and potentially confusing works
00:01:14there are hidden rules you might not expect.
00:01:18Hey.
00:01:20Hello, Matthew. Lovely to see you.
00:01:23Lovely to see you.
00:01:29No gap?
00:01:31No gap. I'm going to get you to take some of it off.
00:01:33Oh, yeah, OK.
00:01:35I work every day in a studio,
00:01:38paint abstract paintings based on patterns,
00:01:41together with my painting partner, Emma Biggs.
00:01:46You know how sometimes you get scrapes into it?
00:01:49Yeah.
00:01:49Can you get some scrapes into it?
00:01:51Yes.
00:01:53That comes to it?
00:01:54Yeah, that.
00:01:55Like that?
00:01:56Yeah.
00:01:56OK.
00:01:58But Emma's really the generator of the colours.
00:02:03She thinks them up, she physically mixes them,
00:02:06she mixes up the paint, and she places them.
00:02:09And I'm the applier.
00:02:11It's a kind of double act.
00:02:14Which, most of the time,
00:02:17the main emphasis is on what comes out of Emma's head.
00:02:22Yeah, that's better.
00:02:23Yeah?
00:02:23Yeah.
00:02:26The history of abstract art is really a history of experiment.
00:02:30So a lot of things come up for experimentation.
00:02:33You know, you've got colour theory, art, people who do very honourable and serious type of art based on scientific
00:02:43ideas of what makes colours zing together.
00:02:49Then you've got abstract art, which is all about accident, but all of them are trying to find some kind
00:02:58of visual metaphor, which will be rich enough for what one might call reality.
00:03:09Art is partly ideas and theories, but it's really only anything at all because of how it looks.
00:03:16Looking is something you have to get used to.
00:03:20Here are some abstract squares, the kind of thing people often glance at and then turn away from, baffled.
00:03:29The one on the left is by Mondrian, a famous figure, and the one on the right is by Lyubov
00:03:34Popova, who's less well-known.
00:03:36We'll be meeting both those artists later.
00:03:40Each painting has shapes that echo the basic shape of the thing they appear on, the square shape of the
00:03:46canvas.
00:03:49In hers, you're seeing squares stretched out, fragmented, morphed into triangles, tilted so they seem flying or full of movement.
00:04:05In his abstract squares, the colour is stark based on contrast.
00:04:14With hers, the colour is continuous and sympathetic.
00:04:18The grey and the pink are a softer version of the harder black-red-white relationships.
00:04:24The grey and the pink take the eye back gradually, making space throughout seem three-dimensional.
00:04:32So, opening up to abstract values is an adventure, and you start by being willing to look.
00:04:42The dynamism of the way in which shapes are placed prevents you from reading that white as if it were
00:04:48a hole that can be seen through.
00:04:50It reads clearly as over the other colours.
00:04:53That's not easy to pull off.
00:04:55It depends on the minor displacement of angles everywhere.
00:05:00Pink follows red, and grey has a blue-green character that also complements the red.
00:05:06It's the colour in Popova's painting that contributes more than anything else to the difference between her squares and Mondrian's
00:05:14squares.
00:05:28If abstracts have got something to do with reality, but the artists aren't going to picture reality, why not?
00:05:34And what reality are we talking about?
00:05:42Art had been expected to picture reality according to approaches and styles that were acceptable to most people, a lovely
00:05:50landscape by Rubens.
00:05:55But then, in the 19th century, new ideas about reality meant Cezanne could picture reality as patterned shapes.
00:06:05In the early 20th century, the cubist painter Braque responded to Cezanne by picturing reality as flattened space.
00:06:13A few years later, abstract art responded to cubism with shapes and spaces only.
00:06:25People's sense of what was real was up for grabs because everyday existence was full of rapid change caused by
00:06:33science.
00:06:33Artists saw spirituality as both a challenge to the power of science and a way of harnessing it.
00:06:42This counter-intuitive idea came from the spiritual movement of Theosophy, which was founded in New York in 1875 by
00:06:52Helena Blavatsky.
00:06:55Blavatsky took aspects of Eastern religion and aspects of science, mostly evolution,
00:07:02and came up with a spiritual movement based on evolution of the soul.
00:07:16Abstract art started at the very peak of Theosophy's popularity.
00:07:22People thought spirituality was like X-rays or infrared radiation or electricity.
00:07:31It could be revealed.
00:07:41There were a lot of different artistic takes on the spiritual, but the strangest was the earliest.
00:07:48Hilma F. Klint, who was born in 1862 and lived and worked in Sweden.
00:07:54These are paintings by her from 1907.
00:08:05For decades, nobody knew about them, but recently they've emerged and started to be exhibited all over the world.
00:08:23From totally invisible, she's become the main excitement about historic abstract art.
00:08:32A woman doing abstraction, plus doing it so it's full of meaning.
00:08:47What kind of meaning?
00:08:49What kind of meaning?
00:08:49Abstract artists were into spirituality, but Af Klint thought of herself as being in touch with actual spirits.
00:09:01She conducted seances in this room and received messages from spirits who were called the High Masters.
00:09:21She produced 23,000 pages of notes working out what the High Masters were telling her to paint.
00:09:29It was all theosophical meaning.
00:09:34Theosophy says colours and shapes can symbolise the soul's journey.
00:09:39The tip of a coloured pyramid is the soul arriving within the golden circle of pure spirit.
00:09:47And there's pure spirit, theosophy claims, when dark is balanced with light, masculine with feminine.
00:09:57All Af Klint's paintings are profoundly theosophical.
00:10:01The not-theosophical thing about them is the general look.
00:10:06And this doesn't come from spirits, because to risk controversy for a moment, there is no such factual thing as
00:10:13a spirit.
00:10:14They are mental projections.
00:10:17To have the ability to create such a mental projection without suffering debilitating mental illness is a fantastic thing.
00:10:25But when it comes to creating a work of art, a mental projection alone isn't sufficient, because art isn't made
00:10:32just from visions.
00:10:36It's made from visual traditions.
00:10:40The other abstract artists, rooted in the visual traditions of painting, explain themselves only partly by spirituality.
00:10:48With her, it's everything.
00:10:49It was beamed down to her by a high master on the astral plane, who commissioned paintings from her.
00:10:56She knew what the reason was.
00:10:58So that those down on the earthly plane, if they've enlightened themselves enough, might benefit from them.
00:11:05And that could be you, so keep an open mind.
00:11:17It was only recently, decades after her death in 1944 at 82, that Af Klint became known.
00:11:24Now her work is categorized as the first abstract art, but there's very little evidence she thought of it as
00:11:31art at all.
00:11:33Rather than abstraction, type of art that didn't exist in 1907, she thought it was direct meaning.
00:11:40To us, it looks like abstract art, but it's really diagrams explaining theosophical ideas.
00:11:51To see what else there is to abstraction, you have to look elsewhere.
00:12:03The Russian artist, Vasily Kandinsky, is the lord of abstraction.
00:12:13He said it was created from inner necessity, and it didn't need nature to picture.
00:12:19It contained all of nature anyway, just in abstract art's shapes and colors.
00:12:29He meant the artist's sensitivity, his feelings and memories, are full of nature's impressions.
00:12:36They can be got down onto the canvas in a completely abstracted way.
00:12:47This is a painting by Kandinsky from 1912.
00:12:51Its title, Painting with Black Arch, encourages you to think about only what you're seeing.
00:12:58That black arch is unmistakable.
00:13:03But Kandinsky knows that seeing art is a heightened seeing.
00:13:08It's made loaded by you being very visually alert,
00:13:12and by your thoughts and expectations being primed by some kind of theory.
00:13:21The Book of the Lord is called On the Spiritual in Art.
00:13:25Kandinsky published it in 1911, and it was read throughout Europe.
00:13:30It was the first moment of abstract art becoming widely known.
00:13:38Like Hilmar F. Klint, Kandinsky was inspired by Theosophy's notion
00:13:43of a coming new age of the great spiritual.
00:13:49Kandinsky's artistic approach was different to Hilmar F. Klint's, though.
00:13:53She thought paintings were diagrams to be interpreted by study.
00:13:57He thought the actual materials of painting, colour, shape, line, could be manipulated to affect the soul.
00:14:22His line moves across the paper. It's captured on film in the 1920s.
00:14:29He's in his 60s and has been painting abstractly since he was in his late 40s.
00:14:40Making a mark, he doesn't know in advance what's going to happen,
00:14:43because he's not copying anything.
00:14:45But his instinct for making is guided by his experience of making,
00:14:51judging what works, what doesn't.
00:14:56That's a visual thing, not a spiritual thing.
00:14:59He had to get the spiritual to connect to the visual.
00:15:12Madame Blavatsky was not Kandinsky's only spiritual mentor.
00:15:18This is a meditation centre built by one of Blavatsky's followers, Rudolf Steiner.
00:15:32Kandinsky read Steiner's theories.
00:15:35He was drawn to Steiner's proposal that we all inhabit not one, but several bodies.
00:15:41And one of these, the astral body, is invisible.
00:15:54He began attending Steiner's lectures in 1908.
00:16:00By coincidence, this was the same year that Hilmar af Klint first met Steiner.
00:16:06Unknown to each other, these two pioneers of very different types of abstract art
00:16:12were each equally aware that Steiner's education programme in Theosophy
00:16:17had the title, How to Know Higher Worlds.
00:16:28Art could be higher than nature, Kandinsky concluded.
00:16:33Theosophy was essential in the mix, but he needed other elements too.
00:16:44They were the primitive, the musical, and the way colour works.
00:16:54The surfaces of the place he painted in, in Bavaria, were covered in simple art,
00:17:00done by unknown artists, anything outside the Western mainstream.
00:17:04He called it primitive.
00:17:06The primitive, he claimed, gets to the essence of the spiritual.
00:17:15His insight about music and art is that music affects us profoundly,
00:17:20but it doesn't represent anything.
00:17:22He said art could be like music.
00:17:30His paintings before abstraction were glowing landscapes.
00:17:34Composing them gave him a clue.
00:17:36Working with colour was like playing the piano.
00:17:46He said colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers,
00:17:51and the soul is the piano with its many strings.
00:17:55The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key and then another key,
00:18:01in order to make the soul vibrate.
00:18:11He was struck by impressionist paintings by Monet that could be imagined not even to be pictures,
00:18:17he thought, but just colours.
00:18:19And by his own landscapes.
00:18:21One day he saw a painting that had really good colour.
00:18:23He didn't realise it was one of his own on its side.
00:18:29Trivial accidents, like not recognising your own painting, or not realising a picture is a picture,
00:18:36were the jolts of absurdity that Kandinsky needed in order to get his abstract experiment going.
00:18:42So the theory in action, the black arch in painting with black arch,
00:18:48is the means by which the red shape dominates the blue shape, bearing down on it.
00:18:56The black is the accent that animates everything.
00:19:01Let's take a major rhythmic organisational idea, like music.
00:19:07The painting goes diagonally there, and is countered by a different diagonal movement there.
00:19:14One movement counters another.
00:19:32The arch's blackness is continued elsewhere in other black lines.
00:19:38There's variations on a theme, pronounced or merged in, depending on their surrounding colour,
00:19:45like musical chords depend for their mood on what chord comes next.
00:19:58While the visuals of painting with black arch have a logic that can be explained in musical terms,
00:20:06as repetition and surprise, movement, counter-movement.
00:20:12It's not just logic, it's sensual impact, and in my view it's great.
00:20:34Where does the idea that abstract art is difficult come from?
00:20:39From the viewer or the artist?
00:20:49What would it mean if Fiona Ray said her abstracts were spiritual?
00:20:55If Kandinsky's rule was to transcend nature, her rule is the rule of the surprise move.
00:21:06At the moment I'm experimenting with making a painting just in black and white.
00:21:11I usually use colour.
00:21:14What's the reason to not use colour?
00:21:17I don't know quite how to express that in a positive way,
00:21:22but I suddenly felt incredibly fed up with colour,
00:21:24and I wanted to start again by clearing everything out and go back to a very basic black and white
00:21:30beginning.
00:21:34I've seen a really nice sort of loopy gesture that I think I can put down here.
00:21:40I know that it's quite strange being filmed doing this, but the process really is like this.
00:21:43It's like, shall I? No, I won't.
00:21:45No, I won't. Yes. Okay, what about... No, actually...
00:21:48And then suddenly you just do something like that quite casually without even thinking about it.
00:21:59I also think it's important not to take the same size brush or the same bit of colour
00:22:03and repeat it all over a canvas, like a sort of pattern or something.
00:22:07Although a finished painting needs to have its own rhythm and its own structural integrity,
00:22:13I like the idea of somehow getting different bits of paint language to join up and do that
00:22:18and not to do with little repetitions.
00:22:21So you don't literally join it up by doing the same thing everywhere?
00:22:24No, no, because I think...
00:22:25You've got differences, different zones of energy.
00:22:28Yeah.
00:22:31I kind of... I want the viewer to not be entirely sure what the focus is
00:22:34or what the most important thing is, that the whole thing overall is the experience.
00:22:48And I suppose that, in a way, maybe that's what makes me an abstract painter,
00:22:52in that I think that the marks all exist as themselves, in themselves and by themselves,
00:22:57as well as going together to make some kind of image that you might read in one way or another.
00:23:00Yeah. You know, you're aware that there are component parts,
00:23:04but there's also an energy running through them all that unifies them.
00:23:08Yes. And I'm also trying to make a picture of something that doesn't exist,
00:23:12which is an impossibility, of course, but I'll just keep trying.
00:23:17Maybe that's a good definition of abstraction.
00:23:20I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:23It is. It's an impossible task, but it's really...
00:23:25It's a very interesting one.
00:23:36When colours are related together by abstract art,
00:23:41it's not just colours artists like, or they hope the public will like,
00:23:45they're noticing something that colour does.
00:23:48How it can be wrong or right, in or out of key.
00:23:53How the colour of light in the real world filters out all differences
00:23:59and creates a single visual register within which all differences are unified.
00:24:16In 1914, Sonia Delaunay, one of the great founders of abstract art, created this colour painting.
00:24:26It's called Electric Prisms.
00:24:30Delaunay invented a whole new way of compressing arrangement in art down to colour and form.
00:24:42What are colour and form?
00:24:46Form in art means arrangement or structure, but it also means the individual elements that the structure is made up
00:24:55from.
00:24:55Think of music. A piece of music is an arrangement or a composition, but it is made up of smaller
00:25:03musical events that are all related together, so there is a single unity, which is what composition is.
00:25:11The composition is a form and the individual musical events are forms too.
00:25:26Colour isn't something that exists and light reveals it to us. Colour is light.
00:25:36And Delaunay's abstract rule was to create light by scientific laws.
00:25:52In the 1910s, abstract artists were awed by the power of science.
00:25:58If it could cause people to get round the world at high speed and communicate with each other across vast
00:26:04distances, as well as explore the depths of the unconscious, as psychoanalysis was doing, the modern science of the mind.
00:26:12Maybe science could also radically transform art, so art could be a cosmic vision of everything.
00:26:25Throughout history, artists had played with our perception of colour intuitively, but in the 19th century, science began codifying new
00:26:36laws about how we perceive colour.
00:26:39Colours go from red to mauve to blue through all the spectrum and round back again to red.
00:26:46For a long time, this had been visualised as a colour wheel.
00:26:56But in 1855, the colour chemist, Eugène Chevroix, said colours opposite each other on the wheel have the same intensity,
00:27:06and placing them side by side causes what he calls an optical vibration.
00:27:14Delaunay absorbed that scientific rule and took it over to serve her own rule of painterly evocation of the emotional
00:27:23lift of light.
00:27:34Softened colour is subjected to a rigorous but wavering grid, that circular layout.
00:27:45The grid is the form she's using. She's unafraid of breaking it.
00:27:50Colour overlaps the borders onto adjacent colours, following a colour need.
00:27:56Where there's a chance that the relationship between the colours threatens to be the visual equivalent of out of tune,
00:28:02she changes the colour logic, bringing light green over purple, so primrose will sing out.
00:28:11Or intensifying yellow-red to darker red, so it will connect to a rhythmic pulse of dark and light accents
00:28:18everywhere.
00:28:22Delaunay was married to another colourist, Robert Delaunay.
00:28:26They were impressed that their friend Kandinsky liberated colour from having to picture anything.
00:28:33But the Delaunay's had a very different approach to Kandinsky.
00:28:37Think of them in Paris over there, and him working in Germany over there.
00:28:45Colour in Kandinsky is emotion. Emotion events. They're interwoven to create a dynamic drama.
00:28:53He doesn't use the full range of colours.
00:28:57With Delaunay, it's just a simple design, radiating bands.
00:29:02But she uses a vast range of colour, and it's a real inquiry into what colour can do.
00:29:10Every single element of the painting is about a fusing or clarifying of form through subtle adjustments of colour.
00:29:20So the overall form, or composition, celebrates light as a sheer, overwhelming, spirit-lifting force.
00:29:48The Delaunay's got that radiating circles layout, from the glow of colour around the electric lights by night in Paris.
00:29:57The old gas lights had only just been replaced by electricity.
00:30:03Sonia Delaunay recalled in her memoirs,
00:30:06At night on our walks, arm in arm, we entered the era of light.
00:30:11The halos made the colours and shadows swirl and vibrate,
00:30:15like unidentified objects falling from the sky and beckoning our madness.
00:30:28In 1912, when Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art was spreading its message,
00:30:35Robert Delaunay wrote a manifesto called simply Light.
00:30:41The manifesto had a climactic last sentence, like the words of a colour prophet.
00:30:47Let us attempt to see.
00:31:08The rule John Maclean, her bays, is the rule to keep looking for the infinitesimal adjustments
00:31:15that will give simple shapes a convincing subtlety, like light in the world.
00:31:22Let's go on and get rid of that iridescence.
00:31:32Oh, look, I really like the way that red's differentiating itself from the rest.
00:31:51So they're very simple shapes, but it's the treatment of them, as well as the placement of them, that's important.
00:31:59Yes.
00:32:00I do quite a lot of landscapes.
00:32:03So I don't feel any, I feel a complete continuity between figurative painting and abstract painting.
00:32:10I don't see any difference.
00:32:12And I realise perhaps I'm not really a purist.
00:32:19Yes, you don't think that it's about the purity of the abstract forms.
00:32:23You think there's a continuity between abstraction and reality.
00:32:28Absolutely.
00:32:28The visual world.
00:32:30Yes, yes, absolutely.
00:32:32It's interesting that already I'm feeling, no, maybe I was being too impetuous, but it's a very beautiful passage that
00:32:49now.
00:32:49Yes.
00:32:50With the nacreous stuff coming through that thin, very thin glaze of red.
00:32:55Indeed.
00:32:57So maybe there's scope in this for something, you know, of sheer beauty like the wing of a moth or
00:33:07something fleeting like that.
00:33:10In fact, that could be the redeeming bit of the whole painting, and maybe I've won it after all.
00:33:20So the approach is partly to pick out the forms and partly to allow the forms to seem to emerge
00:33:28from the ground.
00:33:29Yeah, a mixture of the atmospheric and, I guess, just not atmospheric.
00:33:36Yeah.
00:33:40I'd be loath to touch that right away, and it may be finished now.
00:33:45Yeah.
00:33:47Yeah.
00:33:47But I feel with my own work that the simpler I can make it, in a strange way, the more
00:33:56profound I feel it is.
00:34:08For the Swiss artist Paul Clay, whose abstracts are often nothing but squares, nevertheless, the rule was always to observe
00:34:17nature.
00:34:19In order to make something abstract seem true to the world around us, Clay uses tonally graded colour.
00:34:32Tone is different to colour. Colour is colour, but tone is the alteration of colour's vivid, bright, vibrating impact by
00:34:42making that colour lighter or darker.
00:34:51Tone here is mostly dark, but with a number of high spots where colour seems to sing out like sunshine
00:34:59hitting a hill, or light seen through the trees.
00:35:15In 1914, when Clay was 35, he went on a trip to Tunisia.
00:35:31The trip was to alter him from being one kind of artist to a completely different kind.
00:35:40And the big moment was an evening visit to the Karouan Mosque in Tunis.
00:36:02You never really see the mosque in the dozens of watercolours that he produced following this visit.
00:36:08And, of course, it isn't Islamic culture or Islamic decorative arts that interest Clay in this moment.
00:36:15You see carefully controlled different degrees of transparency and colour that tells you about constantly shifting light.
00:36:27You get the feeling not that he saw something that was different to anything he'd ever seen, like a colour
00:36:33miracle, but more that he came to the realisation that there was something in him that he could work with,
00:36:40that he hadn't attended to before, and that he could now define.
00:36:49The power of his visual experiments from that trip is in one thing affecting another, as if everything is perception,
00:36:59nothing is anything in itself.
00:37:02Everything is perception, the light on some glass or concrete, the organisation of shapes in the city, the look of
00:37:11the earth, the shapes of clouds and their relationship to the horizon.
00:37:16We organise this sensual input just as we organise our minds about who we are and where we fit in
00:37:25the world and how society is made up.
00:37:31Clay tried to do something about society. He was part of the Bavarian uprising in 1919. Within months, this socialist
00:37:40revolution, inspired by events in Russia, was crushed.
00:37:45The leaders murdered and Clay's dreams of a communist society sympathetic to his kind of art were ended.
00:37:59For the next 20 years, until his death in 1940, Clay divided his time painting and teaching, most influentially in
00:38:08the Bauhaus, the school of art and design set up in Germany in 1919.
00:38:16The first thing you have to do as a visual artist, you would tell his students there, is pay attention
00:38:22to the infinite subtlety of tonal shades in nature.
00:38:29The Nazis had different ideas to Clay's about nature and his art was publicly mocked, along with Kandinsky and Mondrian,
00:38:38in the notorious 1937 exhibition called Degenerate Art.
00:38:47They called Clay a Jew, even though he actually came from a Catholic family, and they said he distorted reality.
00:38:58We all hate the Nazis, of course, but did they have a point about distortion? After all, what's the difference
00:39:05between Clay controlling colour, so there's a feeling of reality, and him just distorting reality?
00:39:15Well, I agree with Clay. I think there is no single correct interpretation of what's out there.
00:39:20We each organise what we perceive and create our own version of it. Clay is trying to pick that process
00:39:27apart.
00:39:28He's offering proposals about what perception is.
00:39:45In our studio, the rule is to think about what's really seen when anyone sees anything.
00:39:55We can only see any kind of form because of the way light reveals it, and it's through light and
00:40:05dark that you sort of understand the shape of something.
00:40:09So that's a fundamental aspect of seeing, that we're abstracting in our works.
00:40:16I mean, if you were to look at, for example, here, this area, which is lighter on one side and
00:40:21brighter on the other.
00:40:22So that, in a sense, you read as lighter, and those two areas you read as darker, and that is
00:40:29contrasted with lighter tone behind it and a darker tone behind that.
00:40:35So it sort of gives some kind of sense of the little image occupying space, as if it had some
00:40:45sculptural form, I suppose.
00:40:47Like a haystack in a field or a pyramid. Yeah, exactly.
00:40:49So you've got light, dark, and then you've got light, light, dark, dark.
00:40:54Yes, exactly. And when that's adjacent to something which does immediately the opposite, so where you have light here, you
00:41:01have dark there.
00:41:02Where you have dark there, you have light there.
00:41:04Where that happens, consistently across the whole canvas, it gives you a kind of a pulsing feel.
00:41:10Yeah, so there's a rigid adherence to a system of light and dark, like there is in life of light
00:41:17and dark, light and dark, wherever you look.
00:41:26The relationship between colour in abstract art and what might loosely be called reality doesn't always stay the same.
00:41:34It depends how colour is used.
00:41:41The next artist is the toughest, as far as giving reality a break goes.
00:41:47It's Mondrian, who follows a rule of always using very few colours.
00:42:04Here's a painting by Mondrian in his famous style.
00:42:10Severely minimal lines and rectangles.
00:42:14It's from 1922, and it's made up only of black lines and white, or a sort of bluish off-white.
00:42:25And a few strong primaries.
00:42:28Blue, yellow, red.
00:42:32Even these few elements are reduced down even more, in that the whole of the surface, or almost the entirety
00:42:41of the surface, is just that white or off-white.
00:42:45And the stronger colours are confined to accents along the perimeters of the square.
00:42:51Blue, yellow, red.
00:42:53The centre is opened out, so there's nothing there but a square.
00:42:59And that square seems to tell you about nothing except the square of the outer edges of the painting.
00:43:10In fact, every shape tells you about every other shape, in that it is either a variation on it or
00:43:16a repetition of it.
00:43:19What else are you seeing in it?
00:43:21Nothing.
00:43:22Except you could see more in what you're already seeing.
00:43:27You're seeing shapes talking to shapes.
00:43:30They're telling each other about themselves.
00:43:33They're defining themselves by their slight differences.
00:43:42He said the masculine is manifested vertically, the feminine horizontally.
00:43:48It's the mysticism of theosophy.
00:43:54Theosophy says in the future all social imbalance will be balanced out in a new societal shape.
00:44:03Mondrian says his art visualises that new shape.
00:44:08Here's Mondrian in his theosophical pose.
00:44:12He actually mixed theosophy with the philosophy of Hegel.
00:44:15Hegel said the universe is governed by rules of tension and contradiction.
00:44:23In Mondrian's painterly version of Hegel's philosophical rule that every element is determined by its contrary,
00:44:31Mondrian offers a line but also a gap.
00:44:37There's a black bar that looks as though it will repeat to fill that space, but it doesn't.
00:44:43In the first case, you're forced to see that line, also the edge of the painting that the line stops
00:44:49short of.
00:44:49You're forced to consider that edge.
00:44:52In the other case, you're forced to see that whole horizontal empty rectangle he's started dividing
00:44:58because he deliberately doesn't continue dividing it.
00:45:07Mondrian influenced modern architecture, but it had no interest for him.
00:45:12He thought architects were hopeless materialists.
00:45:17He envisaged a new shape architectural environment all over the world that would be pure flat plains, lacking solidity of
00:45:28any kind.
00:45:28I don't know how that would work, and I suspect Mondrian didn't either.
00:45:42He's tough on what he thinks of as deception. He wants to get to truth.
00:45:46He's dealing all the time with ideas, but the main one is visual order.
00:45:51He provides a visual organization so elegant and complex that it's capable of endless reinterpretation.
00:46:00But you've got to recognize in the first place that it is visual.
00:46:04And if the particular nature of that organization, pure abstraction, accords with Mondrian's theosophical beliefs,
00:46:13namely that everything we see around us is only an illusion,
00:46:19Maya is the Indian word for that illusion, adopted by theosophy as theosophy adopts terms from all religions,
00:46:26so a purely abstract painting is more true to the real reality that lies behind everything than a painting that
00:46:35attempts to capture aspects of the illusion version of that higher reality.
00:46:41That is a mind twist as well as a sentence twist.
00:46:45Nevertheless, the painting is a visual work of art that demands to be seen on its own visual terms.
00:47:01Nature doesn't disappear in abstract art. Nature's laws are condensed into a visual form.
00:47:07That's the rule Tess Jerry follows. Paintings that combine all sorts of processes, including printing instead of painting.
00:47:16I need to clean that up pretty fast.
00:47:18I see you're doing something. It has to be quite precise, but precision isn't the meaning of what you're doing.
00:47:23Absolutely not. Precision is only ever a tool.
00:47:26It should look as though there is an ambiguity between what is in front and what is behind.
00:47:34You can't quite tell, and that is a way of engaging people with the object.
00:47:39As you say, there's an ambiguity about the front and the behind. There's a sort of flicker between the two
00:47:44colours.
00:47:46Yes, exactly that. So you're not just being presented with something, you are being asked to participate.
00:47:51Yes. So in looking, you're kind of part of the process of what's happening.
00:47:56Yes.
00:47:57You're doing small things here that one could pick up and hold almost like an icon or timeless objects.
00:48:04You are doing things that are very, very resolutely abstract, have only a couple of colours.
00:48:09There's a certain type of surface, very much a physical thing as well as an optical thing.
00:48:13I think that's incredibly important. I mean, in a way, this is how we see the world. Everything is surface.
00:48:18Yeah.
00:48:18You know, when I talk to you, that's all I'm seeing.
00:48:22Because I want the colour to be as intense as possible, I get it screen print with oil-based ink.
00:48:29If I use paint, it's almost impossible to get a completely smooth surface.
00:48:37The more evidence you have on a surface of the way it's done, the less you're going to understand or
00:48:48feel the intensity of the colour.
00:48:50Right, right.
00:48:51I mean, I would like to reduce everything down to its essentials. So in that way, it's kind of following
00:48:59nature.
00:49:00So you're very, very concentrated visual events in a way. They're a concentrated, honed, condensed version of reality of the
00:49:12world.
00:49:12Yes, exactly. Very simplified shapes.
00:49:16And I try to say it with as little added, as little pretension, as directly as...
00:49:22I mean, this whole very complicated system is really set up in order to produce something that looks as though
00:49:29it's totally simple and just popped into the world.
00:49:45Jesus inside geometric shapes. This is an icon in the Byzantine style from the 15th century.
00:49:54The Russian abstract artist Malevich respected this look.
00:49:59Byzantine art stripped down the realistic style that existed in Greek and Roman times, art that shows in detail how
00:50:08reality looks.
00:50:12So a higher reality can be contemplated. Byzantine art ditched the detailed look in favour of simple signs.
00:50:22And for the same reason, Malevich displayed his abstract paintings as if they were icons in a Russian church.
00:50:30He's offering a modern proposal about simple signs serving a higher reality.
00:50:53The rule that form is feeling. Kandinsky stated it, but Malevich took it to the furthest extreme.
00:51:01When Malevich created his pure geometric abstract art style, which he called Suprematism, in 1915, the First World War was
00:51:12underway.
00:51:18There were food shortages, collapsing morale. There was despair at brutality and death.
00:51:28The following year, Malevich was a soldier in the army himself.
00:51:38You're looking at squares again. What are these ones doing?
00:51:45Two of them. One black, one red. One large, one small. One tilted, suggesting movement.
00:51:53Paint is capable of so much more than this, so we know we're being told about extreme limitation.
00:52:02Two squares surrounded by white.
00:52:05There's a set of mathematical relationships there where shapes and spaces are made to seem visually equivalent.
00:52:13So the black shape is the same as the white space underneath it.
00:52:19The white space to the right of the red shape is somewhat the same as the red shape.
00:52:24There's a sense throughout of this is this, this is this, this is the same as this.
00:52:31Movement implied by something very, very small.
00:52:34You'd think you couldn't get much more reduced than that.
00:52:39But this painting was done very shortly after he created a work called The Black Square.
00:52:45The most famous abstract painting in history.
00:53:01He redid the original version several times because it's surface cracked.
00:53:07This 1923 version is a delight of velvety, rich, granulated, brushy blackness.
00:53:17The creation of something out of nothing. A painted something.
00:53:28There's something absurd about it, as if with suprematism there's a rightness of shapes,
00:53:35but insanity about how he got to that rightness.
00:53:41He said the logical consequence of no one ever being able to put back together
00:53:47all the fragmented bits of reality in cubism is that art should take the next step
00:53:53and abandon logic, embrace its absence.
00:53:58Malevich was offered a word for no-logic creativity by the poets he knew.
00:54:04The word was zeum.
00:54:07The poets wrote manifestos for a changed future
00:54:11in which the food shortages would be solved by transforming soil into bread.
00:54:17Horses would be free and there'd be equal rights for cows.
00:54:25Where you might make out a table with a violin on it in a Picasso cubist painting,
00:54:31a Malevich cubist painting would have a violin with a cow on it.
00:54:40His friends called themselves futurists.
00:54:43He put on an opera with them in 1913.
00:54:46He provided sketches for costumes and sets.
00:54:51And two years later he elaborated this sketch into the black square.
00:55:01He painted it in a kind of ecstasy.
00:55:04He couldn't sleep or eat, he was so jangled.
00:55:07It all seemed clear.
00:55:08He wrote that the black square equals feeling.
00:55:12The white field equals the void, beyond feeling.
00:55:22Supreme, in the word suprematism, the name that Malevich gave to his geometric style,
00:55:29means supreme over reality.
00:55:32He said that the objects that make up this world are not reality.
00:55:37They might call forth feeling, but feeling separated from reality is the only true reality.
00:55:47He means the objects out there that we assume to make up objective reality don't really.
00:55:54In fact, it's only by abstracting objects that we can get to reality.
00:56:03This has a long title, but part of it is the term fourth dimension.
00:56:08It was fascinating to artists.
00:56:11Time warped by space, or the other way around.
00:56:18Ordinary existence warps into higher existence in the fourth dimension.
00:56:23That was the claim of the Russian theosophist P.D. Uspensky.
00:56:28Malevich absorbed the theosophical lesson, like so many abstract artists then,
00:56:35and built it into his paintings.
00:56:37Abstraction soaring into the beyond.
00:56:48He explained to his students,
00:56:51we've come to the rejection of reason,
00:56:53but only because there's a new form of reason now.
00:56:57Some of Malevich's students would become the new Russian avant-garde
00:57:01that would make him seem old-fashioned.
00:57:03They were called constructivists.
00:57:08One of them was Lyubov Popova.
00:57:10This is a design by her for the cover of a magazine from 1922.
00:57:16The fact that it is abstraction turned to a functional use
00:57:20tells you about the turn taken in the early 20s by abstract art in Russia.
00:57:32Clarity. Powerful look-atability.
00:57:35But it's not about contemplating the ineffable.
00:57:38It's about making a magazine attractive,
00:57:40and looking at new things,
00:57:42because it's a magazine of new kino, new cinema.
00:57:47To appreciate that as a jump, as radical,
00:57:52as abstraction being invented in the first place,
00:57:55you have to look once again at what abstraction is.
00:58:02Abstraction strips everything down to form,
00:58:06but form can be radically different from instance to instance,
00:58:11even though it looks like it's just more form.
00:58:17This painting by Popova from 1917 was influenced by Malevich's teaching.
00:58:23The difference between it and her magazine cover from a few years later,
00:58:28when she'd become a constructivist,
00:58:30is that form isn't feeling for the constructivists.
00:58:34Form is useful.
00:58:43There'd been world war and civil war.
00:58:47Now there was extreme poverty, violence, hunger,
00:58:52breakdown of communication and transport,
00:58:55and out of all that, not just a new society had to be built,
00:58:59but a type that had never existed before on Earth.
00:59:06The constructivists identified the factories as the centre of production.
00:59:12Art should move there.
00:59:14They even changed the name of art to production.
00:59:21This is a productivist sculpture by one of Popova's colleagues,
00:59:27Vladimir Steenberg.
00:59:29This form could be a prototype for what a socialist society would actually look
00:59:35and feel and be like, as opposed to how such a society had been theorised
00:59:41and dreamed of before the revolution.
00:59:53Popova's shapes and spaces were for definite things.
00:59:57These ones were for a banner for a revolutionary poet's club.
01:00:03This was the cover of a catalogue for a constructivist exhibition.
01:00:11The controllers of the new revolutionary state were sceptical,
01:00:16and eventually they did crush constructivism and productivism.
01:00:20Well, how are you really going to connect art to politics?
01:00:24Lenin said to the constructivists.
01:00:26When he visited them in the new art schools his government set up and paid for,
01:00:31when there was very little money for anything.
01:00:46Popova taught constructivists and she exhibited with them.
01:00:51They saw no reason to drop abstract form just because no one could understand it.
01:00:57She died at 35 from scarlet fever after only a few months of success in the factories
01:01:04with clothing designs based on geometric form.
01:01:13And the whole constructivist-productivist movement was destroyed by Politburo decrees about form.
01:01:21Abstraction relating to reality was out.
01:01:26Reality had to be conveyed from now on by picturing instead.
01:01:33By propaganda.
01:01:58Constructivism failed.
01:01:59Abstract form would never again automatically mean left politics.
01:02:08It turns out when you make something, you can't necessarily control its meaning.
01:02:21Abstraction in Europe went quiet in the 1930s, with the rise of fascism in the West
01:02:27and totalitarian communism in Russia.
01:02:37The end of the Second World War, in 1945, saw a revival of abstraction in lonely studios in New York.
01:02:50Changing the world by cosmic visions, by spirituality, or art giving a concrete form to socialism,
01:02:59were not the ideas context for abstraction anymore.
01:03:05Being an individual, being an outsider, making those on the inside, the conformists,
01:03:11see what freedom could be. These were the new ideas.
01:03:20Many people think the rule of this artist is no rules at all.
01:03:28In fact, you're seeing a rigidly architectural structure achieved by nothing but free, loose, flowing, open marks.
01:03:37It's an amazing balancing act, once you start to see it.
01:03:41And it shows that the standard criticism of Jackson Pollock, that anyone could do it, is unfair.
01:03:51Paint, very liquefied, only black, no other colour, thrown onto the canvas.
01:03:58And very briefly titled, number 32.
01:04:03The painting was done one day in 1950, with the canvas rolled out onto the wooden floorboards in his studio
01:04:11in New York,
01:04:12in a rural part of the state, a few hours' drive from the city.
01:04:18Ten years before, he'd been in therapy with a Jungian analyst, trying to deal with the alcoholism that defined Pollock's
01:04:26life as much as being an artist defined it.
01:04:30He brought his drawings to the sessions. Later, their lines and spaces would be exploded to become paintings on a
01:04:38vast architectural scale.
01:04:51He said he was painting the aims of the age, and he didn't need to paint nature, because he was
01:04:57nature.
01:05:09It looks pretty free. There's something outrageously free about an artist throwing paint and stepping on the painting.
01:05:19But freedom is a meaning he wants to get across. It comes from the climate of the times.
01:05:24It is not the visual end result that his outlandish process will actually create.
01:05:37However he gets there, he ends up with a tightly controlled rhythmic structure.
01:05:53The canvas is regularly and rhythmically occupied.
01:05:58Imagine the lighter lines without the heavier blobs.
01:06:03Never mind how they're created, they contribute to the visual complexity.
01:06:08It would be a very different effect.
01:06:12The web of lines and angles goes out to meet the outer edges of the painting, pulling back, flowing out,
01:06:20all around those edges.
01:06:22So what happens on the perimeter is a controlled version of what's happening in the centre.
01:06:29You read the meaning through what is impossible to miss, the materials and how they're treated.
01:06:36You're forced to see that the paint is paint, with its dried lumpy bits and delicate stained bits, its range
01:06:44of textures,
01:06:45reflective paint contrasted with paint that has been absorbed by the canvas.
01:06:50Those textures are the things he's composing, their differences are what he makes a visual symphony out of.
01:07:06An artist today in Deptford making something harmonious.
01:07:11Paul Tonkin, like Jackson Pollock, his rule is that harmony can come from a surprisingly wild process.
01:07:20This is just what I do really, I just make these, it's just a question of covering it with paint
01:07:28basically.
01:07:30But I like making these curvy shapes.
01:07:34I suppose someone looking at it now might think, oh, landscape, hills, lakes, is anything like that in your mind?
01:07:42No, I'm just trying to get the stuff on there. But yeah, I see what you mean.
01:07:48Of course.
01:07:50It could be like the Loch Ness Monster as well, couldn't it?
01:07:54Except if something starts looking too much like something very specific, then I might try and change it.
01:08:06Yes, yes, yes, yes. Where shall I put the red?
01:08:10How do you know where to put the blue and the yellow?
01:08:13That's a good point. But now it's getting more complicated, you see.
01:08:17But I'm treating it like a painting, which I do, you see. And it's not.
01:08:21So we're looking at the creation of an underpainting and you, this is part of the, this is a stage
01:08:27that you always go through.
01:08:28It's the first stage, it's, yeah.
01:08:31And the underpainting has a certain life of its own and a certain rhythm.
01:08:35Yes.
01:08:35But it isn't the painting as such.
01:08:37Well, when it's dry, I'll look at it and cut it into rectangles, which, of different sizes, and then pin
01:08:48them to the floor.
01:08:50And then work on top of them.
01:08:53And will each of those rectangles be a separate painting?
01:08:57Yes.
01:08:58It's got a fantastic energetic movement.
01:09:02Yeah, well, that's the thing. That's what I want to get, is the movement.
01:09:06And, but then I'm going to mess it up, you see. That's the, that's the fun bit.
01:09:14Yeah.
01:09:21I don't usually waste quite as much paint as that.
01:09:24That was fantastic.
01:09:25Yeah, but it wasn't kind of what I wanted.
01:09:27And it looks great as well, but I'm going to move back.
01:09:31You better move back, Matthew.
01:09:32Yeah.
01:09:33You better get out of the way, man, because I'm shucking the stuff around.
01:09:37That's fantastic.
01:09:40But it's, it's like destroying and creating at the same time.
01:09:45Yeah.
01:09:45You know.
01:09:46It's amazing how beautiful those veils of colour can be.
01:09:49Yeah.
01:09:50Well, it is, but unfortunately when it dries out, it doesn't stay like that.
01:09:54It doesn't, it's not, it's going, it's going everywhere.
01:10:06That's quite good.
01:10:07Yeah.
01:10:10Where do you think the precision is in what you're doing?
01:10:14What's the precision?
01:10:15Well, it gets more precise.
01:10:16I'd have to show you the later stages to show that it gets very, very precise near the end.
01:10:25It's to do with the drawing, I suppose.
01:10:28And it could, to me, drawing is movement.
01:10:32And colour is the most important thing.
01:10:37I'm trying to get colours working together so that they actually combine to make something that actually,
01:10:45when you come into the studio and you've seen that painting, having had a night's sleep,
01:10:52and you're coming in again, seeing it fresh in the next morning,
01:10:56it will actually make, making a statement back to you.
01:10:59It's, and then you feel, actually, this is a now painting.
01:11:03It's actually telling me something.
01:11:12The next artist is the other side of the same coin of freedom that is controlled in some way.
01:11:19With Dan Perfect, I think his rule is to have totally controlled, calculated stages that result in a look of
01:11:27flowing freedom.
01:11:32I've got a plan. I like a plan.
01:11:36The improvisation happens in the drawings, in the previous stages to the one we're looking at right now.
01:11:43And that's a printout from one of your drawings, your coloured drawings.
01:11:46Here's where it gets scaled up onto a large scale canvas.
01:12:01So these little drawings are like scores.
01:12:05The drawings that you work from?
01:12:07Well, these little printouts, it's like a score that I'm performing, like I was a musician performing.
01:12:15So, you know, it gives me the structure, but these marks have got to be made in real time.
01:12:21It doesn't really matter if there's a bit of splashing, because we're just going further.
01:12:33Trying to make the mark as expressive as possible, really get a sense of its speed, its proper real time
01:12:42quickness.
01:12:43This is the fastest stage of the whole piece.
01:12:45This is the fastest stage, maybe the funnest stage as well.
01:12:51Because out of nothing comes something.
01:12:53Suddenly there's a whole bunch of black marks that begin to indicate something.
01:12:58I mean, even though my work is very non-representational, nevertheless it should be evocative.
01:13:04I suggest a sort of natural world without at all depicting anything in particular.
01:13:10Well, yes, it does want to feel like part of our natural world, but maybe an imagined correlation of it
01:13:18somehow.
01:13:19How we pull it inside of ourselves and build little models.
01:13:25So, it's an introvert's experience of an extrovert world.
01:13:30Very good.
01:13:32So, things come and go in this process.
01:13:34They really do, yes.
01:13:35To begin with what looks like an armature.
01:13:38Once that's done, there will never be anything else like that.
01:13:40It comes and goes.
01:13:41No, it won't look like this.
01:13:43And in fact, much of this painting that I'm doing right now is redundant, will become redundant rather.
01:13:49Much of it will be obscured.
01:13:53Okay, that's enough of that one.
01:13:56So, yeah.
01:13:56It's got to dry now.
01:13:57It's got to dry.
01:13:58Yeah, we can't have any drips.
01:14:00Okay.
01:14:00Because a drip would indicate gravity.
01:14:02Yeah.
01:14:02So, I want this really to be floating like it's a, like all these things.
01:14:06I want them to feel like they're a bunch of stuff thrown up in the air and then you've taken
01:14:10a photograph of it.
01:14:11I see.
01:14:12As it just reaches its zenith.
01:14:44In abstract art since Jackson Pollock, there's often a sense that meaning might be as simple as just the way
01:14:51paint is put on.
01:14:53Paint can be applied anyway, sometimes frankly and flatly as if the surface didn't mean anything.
01:15:00Or, which is what these paintings by Mark Rothko are doing, so a sort of breathing surface is the main
01:15:07theme, the main effect by which the painting is able to convey its message.
01:15:31Rothko was a New Yorker whose family immigrated from Russia when he was a child.
01:15:40Until middle age, he was unsuccessful and poor.
01:15:43He sympathized with the revolutionary political movements in the USA in those times.
01:15:54He lived an isolated existence, he was unstable, and so when success came to him in the 1950s, its suddenness
01:16:02was overwhelming.
01:16:04The paintings we were just looking at were done by him in the late 50s as a commission for the
01:16:10new Seagram building for their exclusive restaurant on the top floor called The Four Seasons.
01:16:17But, having painted them, he became furious at the idea of rich bastards, as he called them, eating in front
01:16:24of his work.
01:16:29Ten years later, he gave the paintings away free to what was then the Tate Gallery.
01:16:34He was fanatic about how they should be displayed.
01:16:37The lighting and spacing, even today, is exactly as Rothko wanted.
01:16:46By grim coincidence, he died on the day they arrived in Britain.
01:16:53Rothko committed suicide and his paintings don't depict anything, so it's only natural in a way that we should wish
01:17:00that death might be what they're communicating.
01:17:04I don't personally think that. That's a human tragedy. But the meaning of the paintings is different to that profound
01:17:14visual lift.
01:17:18That's the same meaning that a cathedral has, or the inside of an Egyptian tomb, or a Greek temple. Death
01:17:25is part of those things as well.
01:17:28But in such a universal sense that it's as if the marvel of the whole of existence, not just its
01:17:34termination point, is being celebrated.
01:17:38Death as part of some kind of gigantic cosmic unity.
01:17:44Rather than getting carried away with what has become over the years a sort of rhetoric of heavy breathing emotion,
01:17:53let's try instead to understand what these paintings actually are and how they work.
01:18:07That sense of a surface that is active and expressive gets more and more insistent as you look.
01:18:15Grey is applied lightly, like mist, diffused, so the surface becomes cloudy, not sheer, animated, not still or inert.
01:18:31The painting as a whole is created in terms of misty breakups and stuttering breakups,
01:18:37and then passages that are all about merging and flowing.
01:18:46So if the feeling is, well, it's all dark, or it's all red,
01:18:51the experience of darkness and redness is a nuanced one.
01:19:01A simple colour theme of blackish red is elaborated and celebrated,
01:19:08so that the whole of existence is celebrated.
01:19:13The room is a sort of pharaoh's tomb.
01:19:17In his control freakery, he's a megalomaniac like the pharaohs.
01:19:22He's the pharaoh and the pharaoh's decorator in a Rothko-centric universe.
01:19:28He's the architect, the painter and the philosopher-priest.
01:19:35All that pretentiousness would be off-putting if it weren't for the rule of painterly transformation that is the true
01:19:42interest of this abstract art.
01:19:45The quality of surprise in the treatment of a surface so that looming darkness is alive with energy.
01:19:57The role that colours place next to each other will always suggest depth, different positions in space,
01:20:03was exciting to artists like Paul Clay and Mark Rothko,
01:20:08and has been followed by Albert Irvin, who's now 92, for 50 years.
01:20:19So you put it down in front of those tins?
01:20:24Yeah, that's it.
01:20:25Then drop it onto the back too.
01:20:31Okay, and put those under.
01:20:33Oh God, it's nice to have somebody helping.
01:20:36Well, I'd better come and be your assistant.
01:20:38It's a real luxury.
01:20:46They're abstract paintings, but they're informed by my movement through the world.
01:20:54Those marks seem sort of structural, and they have their own life as events.
01:21:01Yes.
01:21:01Structural in terms of the whole unity, and they have their own personality.
01:21:05Yes.
01:21:08I'd like to think so.
01:21:11They, you know, insofar as painting is a language, I think the brush marks are the verbs.
01:21:19Although that, you can probably analyse that out of extinction if you wanted to.
01:21:25No, I think painting as a language is a good idea, and the brush marks as verbs is a good
01:21:30idea.
01:21:31There are things behind things, you know, like in the space of the studio.
01:21:38Now, if I look across the room, you're standing in front of the wall.
01:21:45Yeah.
01:21:46So, it's those sort of perceptions.
01:21:51I understand completely what you're saying about this.
01:21:53It's as if reality itself is layered.
01:21:55Yeah.
01:21:56And that's the kind of thing that you're looking for in the painting.
01:21:59Yes.
01:22:00But you're doing it through colour.
01:22:02Yes.
01:22:02Through a rather pure colour.
01:22:03When I first started painting abstract paintings, I used to use very sombre colours.
01:22:10I had the idea that an important painting had to be dark, earth colours.
01:22:23The horrible thing is washing all these brushes.
01:22:27I bet.
01:22:37The visual impressiveness of abstract art from the 1950s and 1910s is carried on by abstract art now,
01:22:45but often not with the old sense of abstract purity.
01:22:53Here's some abstract art that's full of glinting reflections.
01:22:57It's by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui.
01:23:04Unlike artists who work on a flat canvas and do create patterns,
01:23:09the visual complexity of which must be structured into the object,
01:23:13El Anatsui allows his work to behave like textiles.
01:23:18And the shadow and light created by the drapery creates an additional focus for what you're looking at.
01:23:26And it's part of the thought process involved in the making.
01:23:39It's a lesson in setting up meaning.
01:23:42Meaning of a simpler, less philosophical kind than the early abstract artists went in for.
01:23:48He offers a jigsaw of meanings that are abstract but easily readable.
01:23:56Its structure imitates a traditional Ghanaian fabric called kente cloth,
01:24:02woven for centuries by labour-intensive processes so the visual effect is very rich.
01:24:08Kente cloth is a source of national pride.
01:24:17If history is in the picture, then the history of colonialism must be in there too,
01:24:22with all its human wretchedness.
01:24:24And the materials El Anatsui uses suggest waste and squalor.
01:24:39A work of abstract art made of bottleneck wrappers,
01:24:42the bits of metal foil that go round the neck of a whiskey bottle or a gin bottle.
01:24:47Rubbish, really, scavenged from the street.
01:24:50He makes it look like gold, but it's old bits of foil.
01:24:55It's rubbish that reads as gold.
01:24:57So there's ambiguity or a double meaning.
01:25:01Baseness that can be transformed into gold, with gold as the good thing.
01:25:06But also baseness might be indistinguishable from or interchangeable with gold.
01:25:12So gold's shimmer, its attractiveness, is untrustworthy.
01:25:23It always depends where you stand in relation to it as to whether or not gold does shimmer.
01:25:29So maybe the impression of gold here is a metaphor for delusion.
01:25:35The pioneer abstract artists a hundred years ago thought abstract values were the path to truth.
01:25:42They took out any meanings to do with history, society, nationhood.
01:25:47Those are the meanings El Anatsui builds in.
01:25:52He presents you with a powerful visual blast accompanied by questions about what power might mean.
01:26:11Today all art competes in a market and purely abstract art is relatively rare.
01:26:19Abstract art that has clues about easily gettable meaning is preferred.
01:26:2529 million, 30 million, 31 million.
01:26:28Abstract art of the past gets huge prices today.
01:26:3177 million five and selling.
01:26:34That much for Orozco.
01:26:37Not because he's subtle about red and black, but because his high status name is synonymous with fabulous success.
01:26:49Money is never really the point.
01:26:53Rothko's predecessor, Hilma F. Klimt, said W is material, U is spiritual.
01:27:02She really did believe what she was doing could alter the world.
01:27:07If there's a rule of early abstract art as a whole, it is that it was incredibly optimistic.
01:27:13So the rule of optimism passing on is the rule I'm now going to sign off with.
01:27:18With a work by an artist who was born the same year that Hilma F. Klimt went up to the
01:27:24spirits in the sky.
01:27:35Here's a kind of abstract art that is unequivocally visually amazing, but open-ended as to whom that amazement is
01:27:45for and where it's coming from.
01:27:47It's partly sinister because it's about wealth and we live in a time when wealth is sinister.
01:27:54And it's partly optimistic because wealth is referred to by rubbish, old bits of thrown away metal foil.
01:28:02So wealth's mystique is removed, its intimidation is removed.
01:28:07We can see through it, but we're still getting the pleasure.
01:28:11And with that pleasure, a sense of a different kind of wealth, the wealth of ideas as art processes contradictions.
01:28:26Matthew Collings reveals how to decipher works by some of the greatest abstract artists at bbc.co.uk slash your
01:28:32paintings.
01:28:33And he'll be hosting a live panel at the Tate Modern asking, what is abstract art?
01:28:37Broadcast on Freethinking on Radio 3 next Wednesday.
01:28:41Tomorrow here on BBC4, architect Zahar Hadid profiles one of her great influences, Russian revolutionary at 10.
01:28:49As a 5 했는데 event.
01:28:54Clarissa's salaamattering on television is unique to Count hen.
Comentários