The fine art of alienation

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discusses the exhibition ABSTRACTION: showing at the Tate Gallery until April 13 no means monopolised the things were seen in paintings as -greatest artists of that period or from the eye of an individual since. person-corresponding to the It was a vocabulary of shapes bourgeois humanism, and the and colours and textures which individualism of the capitalist no longer claimed to refer to society that was being born.

itself and its internal relation. Cubists was that thev henke A GUEST REVIEWER TOWARDS A NEW ART (Admission £1).

The first two decades of this century saw something of a revolution in Western painting-only a very partial revolution, more apparent than rea!, in that it occurred on canvas and not in society.

Artists continued pretty much in the same • essential relationship to other people as they had for the previous 400 years or so of painting for the commercial market.

/That is, they were understood and appreciated (sometimes) by a small elite from the ruling and educated class; from the broad masses they were runito diumeand quite unvurctu.

This despite the fact that it was those masses who produced the surplus value on which painting, like all cultural activities not essential to maintaining life, fed The superficial revolution consisted largely in this: the abandonment of the objective reality of the sensual world; in favour of their own decorative or anxious souls.

Of course this had always been true to a certain extent in post-Renaissance painting: the artist saw through their own eyes and those of the class to which they belonged or were attached:

This inevitably led-to some 'abstraction' some deviation, from what lay 'objectively' in their field of vision when they set up their canvases.

It grew increasingly so in the Post-Impressionism of artists like van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne. .

Yet the ten years or so up to the First World War saw the development of a new vocabulary of painting-though it by 'external nature' , but only to -••- „VIships-and sometimes, as with the Dutchman Mondrian and the Russian Kandinsky, to mystical concepts and systems.

The most important painters in the origin and growth.of abstract' painting were Picasso and Braque who developed in the years around 1910 in Paris the type of painting we call 'Cubist'.

Cezanne

These paintings were, how ever revolutionary, clearly related to earlier developments, particularly to Cezanne.: And they still referred, however complexly and unapparently, to the world around them.

What marked them as revolutionary was their total abandonment of traditional perspective-whereby an object or scene is depicted as being viewed from a single fixed point in space, with all parallel lines pointing to a single 'vanishing point'.

This art of 'perspective' was invented at the beginning of the Renaissance. Prior to then, paintings had been made generally with. more than one vanishing point, with an appearance of flatness and unreality; without giving an illusion of 'likeness' as became possible with the invention of perspec-, tive.

Medieval paintings had been painted, then, as being seen by the ali-seeing eye of the God whom they served. From the late fifteenth century onwards The great achieverent of the MARIULO LINy unir through this way of seeing reality in painting.

Challenge They painted, for example, violin as seen from many points of view simultaneously, thus challenging many aspects of the bourgeois tradition in painting.

Doing this, they inevitably made the painted canvas look very ditterent: it no longer "obviously" reproduced reality, for their realism was not traditional realism-though it remains as all genuine art. must: realism.

The painted surface emphasised that it was just that; it took on a more decorative, patterned, geometric appearance. It was, unfortunately, this more superficial aspect that was taken up most avidly by avant-garde painters around the world.

The social basis of the rapid development of 'abstract' Or. 'non-representational" art is fairly clear. It was initially a rebellion against a reality that was, in fact, dehumanised and debased-the reality of capitalist society, no longer progressive, but still brutal and ugly and fundamentally hostile in many ways to the production of art.

Because petty bourgeois artists did not see the social revolution that was necessary to end this regime, they tried to have a revolution in the world of art to which they retreated, as they reacted against both capitalist reality and the bourPicasso: Still Life (1912) geois artistic tradition., Symbolically and geographically at the centre of this large exhibition of the pioneering works of abstract painting are Cubist works by Picasso and Braque.

In the rooms around this revolutionary centre, are paintings grouped according to the nationality that was, by 1910, becoming much less important to art, as a 'world school' replaced the national schools of an earlier stage of capitalist society.

Abstraction

There are the Dutch paintings, grouped around Mondrian, with their vertical/horizontal grids and squares of colour. Mondrian's own development towards abstraction is carefully shown in a well-chosen selection of paintings.

There are the Russian painters like Rodchenko and Malevich, perhaps historically the most important pioneers of purely abstract painting; there are the French, who probably descended best into purely decorative and meaningless abstraction; the German, the British, the American.

In these paintings of ten years of phenomenally amazing growth are some very exciting and interesting works.

And in them are virtually all the elements which abstract painters since then have. used, re-arranged and made money with as they pick up and discarded. discarded th capitoust hiket system ensures are the basis of much 'art' (This is true, equally, of much 'representational' painting, equally unadventurous, stale and at the mercy of the market place).

Pioneers These pioneers certainly saw their artistic revolution as being socially relevant; many even saw it as a blow against an individualistic capitalist society essentially opposed to the production of art.

But in the pure abstract works of even this exhibition, we must wonder whether the total rejection of the sensuous world, this 'liberation' as the painters saw it, is not ultimately sterile. They are mostly paintings of paint, or of an individualistic 'self expression' These are sociaily anonymous paintings; monuments to capitalist society's alienation: the alienation of the masses