Glorified Fingerpainting?

My friends and I enjoy checking out the Museum of Art on campus – it holds a wonderful collection of paintings. The one section of paintings that has tripped us up over the years is the modernist section – full of the infamous non-compositional, abstract series of paintings.

Here’s an example of something on display (White Territory, Mitchell, 1970)

What the heck is going on here? Does it mean anything? Or to quote the classic insult towards abstraction: “My kid could do that! That’s just FINGERPAINTING!”

So why do we put these paintings in museums and position them with so much cultural reverence?

I was so invested in this question that I took a class on abstract art a few semesters ago. The ace in your deck of visual analysis strategies are the following question:

-how is this painting guiding my eyes?

It’s important to know that European abstract art (this is an important distinction to make, there exist many forms of abstract art throughout the ages, each with their own projects, and I don’t want to generalize. The painting I’ve pictured above represents the influence of European modernism that confuzzles many in the museum setting) is very self-aware of the history of painting. European art had become highly realistic, highly focused on recreating landscapes and portraits. Artists felt that after a point, there was going to be nothing left to paint. Moreover, with the invention of photographs, the whole purpose of painting realistically was called into question.

So painters decided to approach their craft from a fresh perspective. They decided to go back to basics. Asking fundamental questions like, what makes painting special and unique? Why do we mix colors the way we do? How do we guide a viewer’s eye across the canvas?

Let’s look at one famous artist’s trajectory: Piet Mondrian. This is an early painting of his from around 1900:

This is one from a few years later:

by 1930, this is what he was painting:

Quite the change in style? Clearly, Mondrian knew how to paint. But did he straight up forget how to along the way?

Well, no biographical evidence suggests he lost his edge. It would seem he was trying to do something new. Let’s trace the changes along his path.

That painting of the house is hauntingly good. But looking closely at it, it’s already clear he was moving away from realism. The color saturation looks off, the reflection is stylized to look extra wavy, the symmetry is unbalanced to make the whole painting feel askew, unnerving almost.

Mondrian was playing with the fundamentals of how to elicit emotion in a viewer. He wanted to know how BASIC he could get while still influencing someone to think when looking at a painting.

So we move to the second painting, a series of curves and shadows. They could be a haunted house, a dark forest, or something else. But maybe it doesn’t matter what Mondrian actually paints. Maybe his goal in the first place is to make a viewer feel something. So does it matter what subject he chooses if his end goal is to elicit emotion, rather than represent a specific object? This is the question painters like Mondrian were asking.

Finally, we move to the last painting. There’s a lot of philosophy behind this one that is dense – a Hegelian notion of the dialectic – the synthesis of two binary compositional decisions, be they space, color, or something else, combining to form artistic unity. This is a little heavy handed, but simply put, Mondrian is now beyond emotion and asking an even more basic question: how does a painter control the space of the canvas in the most basic way?

Note the use of the three primary colors, black and white. Note the giant red square, which decenters the painting, preventing true symmetry, forcing our gaze to the fringes of the painting. Would the effect of this painting be the same if we flipped it sideways?

To be completely honest, I haven’t spent enough time reading to answer this question satisfactorily. But enjoy returning to the problem of abstract painting when I’m experiencing writer’s block, to remind myself that sometimes, returning to a basic approach can add a sense of clarity to what I’m trying to achieve with my own art.