Fall 2002
Volume 29, Number 1
What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel)
Robert B. Pippin
1
The
emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the century with
Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of
America in the fifties (Rothko, Pollock, and others) remains puzzling. Such a
great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its
radicality. The fact that nonfigurative art, without identifiable content in
any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated, and, finally, eagerly bought
and, even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies of banks and insurance
companies, provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural
history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category
of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue.
Whatever
else is going on in abstraction as a movement in painting, it is relatively
uncontroversial that an accelerating and intensifying self-consciousness about
what it is to paint, how painting works, and a transformation of painting
itself into the object of painting (issues already in play since impressionism)
are clearly at issue. Given that heightened conceptual dimension, one might
turn for some perspective on such developments to that theorist for whom the
historical development of self-consciousness amounts to the grand narrative of
history itself. Even if for many Hegel is, together with Locke, the bourgeois
philosopher (the philosopher of the arrière-garde), he is also
the art theorist for whom the link between modernity and an intensifying
self-consciousness, both within art production and philosophically, about art
itself, is the most important. We owe to Hegel the fairly natural idea of
abstraction as a kind of logical culmination of modernist self-consciousness
itself. More broadly, the very existence of abstract art represents some kind
of accusation against the entire tradition of image-based art, involves some
sort of claim that the conditions of the very intelligibility of what Hegel
calls the “highest” philosophical issues have changed, such that
traditional, image-based art is no longer an adequate vehicle of meaning for us
now, given how we have come to understand ourselves, have come to understand
understanding. And Hegel was the
only prominent modern philosopher who in some way gave voice to that
accusation, who argued—at the time, outrageously—that traditional
art had become "a thing of the past" and that it no longer served
"the highest needs of human spirit."1 (That is, it still
served lots of extremely important human needs, but not “the
highest.”)
Of
course, all these ideas—that a form of art could be in some sense
historically required by some sort of conceptual dissonance in a prior form,
that a historical form of self-understanding could be called progressive, an
advance over an earlier stage, that various activities of spirit, art,
politics, religion, could be accounted for as linked efforts in a common
project (the achievement of self-knowledge and therewith the realization of
freedom), and so forth – are now likely to seem naïve, vestigial, of
mere historical interest. But the justifiability of that reaction depends a
great deal on, as in all such cases, on how such Hegelian claims are
understood. For example, it is no part at all of any of the standard
interpretations of Hegel’s theory that, by closing this particular door
on the philosophical significance of traditional art, he meant thereby to open
the door to, to begin to conceptualize the necessity of, non-image-based art.
And, given when Hegel died, it is obviously no part of his own
self-understanding. But there is nevertheless a basis in his philosophical
history of art for theorizing these later modern developments. Or so I want to
argue.
2
Consider
the most obvious relevance: the
general trajectory of Hegel’s account. The history of art for Hegel
represents a kind of gradual dematerialization or developing spiritualization
of all forms of self-understanding. Put in the terms of our topic, the basic narrative
direction in Hegel’s history of art is towards what could be called
something like greater abstraction in the means of representation—from
architecture and sculpture, towards painting, music and finally
poetry—and greater reflexivity in aesthetic themes. Within the narrative
of developing self-consciousness presented by Hegel, not only would it not be
surprising to hear that at some point in its history, art might come more and
more to be about abstract objects, like "paintingness" or some such,
but we might also hope to find some explanation of why the development of art
might have brought us to this point. There will be much that remains
surprising, especially the dialectical claim that with such a topic the
capacities of art itself would be exhausted, would no longer be adequate to its
own object, but the cluster of topics raised by the question of the meaning of
abstraction naturally invites an extension of Hegel's narrative.2
Sketching
this trajectory already indicates what would be the philosophical significance
of this development for Hegel: that human beings require, less and less,
sensible, representative imagery in order to understand themselves (with
respect to the highest issue—for Hegel, their being free subjects), that
such a natural embodiment is less and less adequate an expression of such a
genuinely free life—especially since the essential component of such a
free life is an adequate self-understanding.
[…]
3
It
is certainly true that Hegel seems to have had some presentiment of the great
changes that were to come in postromantic art and to have appreciated the
significance of those changes, to have realized that they amounted to much more
than a change in artistic fashion. Contemporary artists, Hegel says,
“after the necessary particular stages of the romantic art form have been
traversed,” have liberated themselves from subject matter, from any
nonaesthetically prescribed determinate content.
[…]
So
why then did traditional, representational art come to be experienced as
inadequate, a kind of historical relic rather than a living presence? […]
I note four such distinct peculiarities because, I will try to show, they are
the most important in understanding a comprehensive Hegelian view (or possible
view) on the issue of abstractionism.
4
The
first and most peculiar is how Hegel ties art ubiquitously, in all cases, to the
divine. In a way that greatly complicates his use of the term, Hegel does
not confine that issue solely to explicitly religious art of the classical
Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern periods. All art, no
matter the subject matter, from still life to portrait to landscape to
historical scenes, is understood as an attempt “to portray the
divine.” This ought right away to alert us that this sweeping reference
is, to say the least, nonstandard and will require considerable interpretation.
[…]
5
Second,
Hegel is one of the very few philosophers or writers or artists of this period
– I would guess the only one – for whom the beauty of nature was
of no significance whatsoever. Nature’s status as an ens creatum, as a reflection of God, or
natural beauty as an indication of purposiveness are of no importance to him,
and he expresses this while evincing no gnostic antipathy to nature itself as
fallen or evil. Nature is simply spiritless, geistlos, or without
meaning, even boring.
[…]
Hegel
is well known as the philosophical founder of the historical study of art, the
most important proponent of the idea that artworks must be understood as of
their time, where such a time could itself be understood comprehensively as an
integrated whole, a point of view, or Weltanschauung. And this premise
contributes as well, in quite an unusual and unexpected way, to the thesis that
art cannot matter for us now as it used to, that representational art has
become a thing of the past. We can begin to see how this works by noting that
Hegel, although associated with the philosophical romanticism of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany, veers off that course
pretty radically on this historical issue. He sees what his age requires, what
is a need of spirit, in quite a different way, and that will be important for
the fate-of-art issue.
[…]
Hegel’s
narrative of an expanding critical self-consciousness thus fits the modernist
refusal to take for granted what a painting or art was, what writing or being
an artist was. Such notions were now treated as norms, neither fixed by nature
nor human nature, but actively (and in Hegel historically) legislated and subject
to criticism. And, with such questions raised this way, it would be no surprise
that art making and novel writing would themselves become the subjects of art;
Proust and James, de Kooning and Pollack are only the most obvious examples.
With
this in mind, then, the official Hegelian claim goes like this. The basic
principle of modern philosophy (that is, post-Kantianism), modern politics
(liberal, republican politics, after a fashion), and modern religion
(Protestant post-Reformation religion) has become what Hegel calls subjectivity
or reflection, ultimately a version of critical and rational self-consciousness
about the way we actively render the world intelligible or legislate normative
constraints on claims and conduct.28 Normative claims to knowledge,
rectitude, spiritual life, or even claims to be making art, or that that
was good, are now made with the self-consciousness that the authority of
such claims can always be challenged and defeated (or such claims could simply
die out, lose historical authority) and must be in some way defensible to and
for subjects if they are to be defensible at all. The pre-Hegelian situation is
one in which we acted on the basis of such norms but could not fully understand
their autonomous status and so proposed social and philosophical justifications
to each other that could not be reconciled and that always betrayed an element
of “positivity” or mere contingency or power. One of the most
important things Hegel says about this situation, the one most relevant to his
use of religious terminology, is that the basic state of human dissatisfaction
or alienation is a self-alienation, not one from a transcendent God, or
even from the truth. Spirit, human being itself, is said to be a
“wound” that it inflicts on itself, but that it can heal itself (A,
1:8; trans. mod.). Art is to be understood as an aspect of the age’s
reflection on itself (that healing), a way for the spirit of such an age not
just to be lived out, but itself aesthetically thematized.
[…]
All
of this was necessary to state what is for Hegel the essential limitation of
traditional art, and it is not a religious limitation: representational art
cannot adequately express the full subjectivity of experience, the wholly
self-legislating, self-authorizing status of the norms that constitute such
subjectivity, or, thus, cannot adequately express who we (now) are. Only
philosophy can heal such a self-inflicted wound and allow the self-determining
character of experience its adequate expression. (“Only
philosophy,” that is, on Hegel’s official account. I am trying to
suggest that there is no reason a form of art, like abstraction, could not make
such a point in a nondiscursive way.)29 After such a healing, of course, fine art will certainly
continue to be produced (indeed, Hegel says that he hopes art will always
“rise higher and come to perfection” [A, 1:103]).30
[…]
It is the
historical realization of subjectivity in the modern world (especially the
greater realization of freedom in philosophical and political life) that makes
representational art (or all art up to and including romantic art) matter less
for us than it once did and had to.33 In an obviously deeply
contestable claim, Hegel asserts that what has come to matter most to us has
less and less to do with a visual or even corporeal intelligibility based on
what we might now call pre-Kantian assumptions about representation and
intelligibility. What unavoidably must matter now is the realization of a kind
of freedom, autonomy.
[…]
The
elusive motto for all this, the broad implications of which Hegel understood
better than Kant, is Kant's dense redefinition of any possible object:
"that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united"
(CPR, B137, p. 156). This would provide the context for seeing
abstraction as self-conscious, conceptual, not, as with Greenberg, reductionist
and materialist. Pollocks and Rothkos are not presentations of paint drips and
color fields and flat canvas. They conceptualize components of sensible meaning
that we traditionally would not see and understand as such, would treat as
given, and this can make sense because the result character of even sensible
apprehension, a generalized idealism evident even in the likes of Nietzsche and
Proust, has come to be part of the intellectual habits of mind of modern
self-understanding, even if unattended to as such. Such is for Hegel the new
way nonrepresentational art might matter.
Modernism
after Hegel would then look something like what Hegel prophesied after romantic
art: “the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in
the form of art itself” (A, 1:80; my emphasis). One could say
that for both Hegel and a major strand of modernism (the strand that culminates
in abstractionism) the decisive modern event was the end of the authority of
nature as such, in itself, as a norm, a hard-fought practical achievement,
together with the insight that this did not, could not mean what the
traditionalists always feared–mere normlessness. What, instead, a kind of
self-authored normativity or human freedom might be is a terribly
difficult question. But perhaps, over the last hundred years, and especially in
the experiments of abstraction, we now have some sense of what it looks like
(thus both confirming and undermining Hegel’s claim about the way art
could now matter).40
I
am much indebted to Thomas Pavel for his comments on an earlier draft of this
paper, to Thomas, Eric Santner, and Terry Pinkard for many fruitful
conversations about Hegel’s Lectures during a seminar in the spring
of 2001, and to the audience at a conference on abstract art held at the
University of Chicago in October 2001, where an earlier version of this paper
was first presented.
2.
This is not at all the same thing as saying that the development of Western art
tends towards ever greater formalism—in the sense of a preoccupation with
“pure” form, understood as without content. So abstraction
can be a misleading word. But in aesthetic theory as well as ethical theory
Hegel claims to have been able to show how there can be concrete universals, a kind
of independence from particularity that is not the adoption of a
mere-one-among-infinitely-many stance. An analogy: when we say that abstract
painting is formal, we ought to mean that it has only itself, or painterly
possibilities, as its own content, in the same way that for Hegel the content
of speculative philosophy is nothing but the history of philosophy itself. Or
Proust’s novel is about novel writing and so has its own form as
its content. But the novel is not empty of content. Or when people say
that Henry James's novels are too stylized, are formal experimentations, they
often don’t appreciate that such a stylization represents an independence
from a fixed perspective on content that has itself a profound moral meaning: that
content (“independence from a fixed perspective on content”).
21.
I am of course aware that, glancing back at European history in the twentieth
century, expressing such Hegelian views without irony or qualification can seem
a little naïve. But, as in so many cases, we need a comprehensive view of
what Hegel means by insisting on the “rationality” of modern
ethical life, and I don’t believe such an interpretation is yet available
among the prominent competitors, descendants of the nineteenth-century
Left-Right Hegel wars. For what I hope is a start, see my “Hegel’s
Ethical Rationalism,” Idealism and Modernism, pp. 417–50.
22.
“Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the
deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought” (A, 1:74).
29.
A remark in the spirit of such a reading of Hegelian modernism: Clark’s
on a photograph of Picasso’s paintings at Sorgues: “Painting at
Sorgues, says the photograph, stands on the threshold of a new order and chaos;
and not just painting, by the looks of it, but picturing in general; and not
just picturing, but maybe perceiving; and not just perceiving but maybe
being-in-the-world, or at least having-the-world-be-visible; maybe the world
itself" (FI, p. 174). Clark is quite right, I think, then to quote
an apposite passage from Hegel on the world-historical individual. (My
differences with Clark concern a number of points of emphasis, especially over
the range and depth and usefulness of appeals to categories like capitalism and
socialism, and with his melancholic treatment of a putative failure in a social
reconciliation between autonomy and embeddedness in a community, reflected in
the “failure” of modernism. See especially chapter 4 on
“Cubism and Collectivity,” and on Pollock as “unhappy
consciousness,” chapter 6, and, inter alia, pp. 1–13, 259. Although
he insists that he is praising abstract expression, Clark’s reliance on
these social categories leads him to characterize the painting movement as “vulgar”
or “the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie's aspiration to aristocracy,
to a totalizing cultural power" (FI, p. 389). But, despite such
disagreements, the spirit of the narrative in Farewell to an Idea
certainly qualifies it as the most ambitiously “Hegelian” treatment
of modern art, known to me anyway.
30.
At the close of the lectures, Hegel appears to give fine art a new, different,
and quite important function: ”Art itself is the most beautiful side of
that history [the unfolding of truth in world history] and it is the best
compensation for hard work in the world and the bitter labor for
knowledge” (A, 2:1236–37). Note too that Hegel claims that
the supersession of art by philosophy also provides "an inducement for
taking up the essence of art too in a profounder way" (A, 1:21).
33.
There is a tension here in Hegel’s position. Prior to the Hegelian stage
of modernity, the intuitive expression of the truth that art alone made
possible was counted as a necessary element in the becoming-self-conscious of
such a truth, while, after that stage, art was to merely express sensibly a
truth attained properly by philosophy. But this would mean that in such a
philosophical stage, art would no longer be functioning as art. As art,
it is an aspect of a sensible reflection of truth unavailable in any other way;
see Henrich, “Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference
to Hegel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A
Collection of Essays, trans. David Henry Wilson et al., ed. Richard E.
Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, N.J., 1979), pp. 107–33. See
especially Henrich’s note on p. 114 about Hegel’s 1828 aesthetics
lectures. (This essay is a catastrophically bad translation of the powerful,
original article that compellingly defends the relevance of the Hegelian
analysis for modern art. See Henrich, "Kunst und Kunst Philosophie der
Gegenwart," Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 [1983].)
40.
This last remark pulls hard at only one thread intertwined with many others in
Hegel’s assessment of the state of art at the end of romanticism.
Specific aesthetic issues—his evaluation of the greater importance of
color over drawing and linear perspective, his apparent commitment to the
paramount importance of human beings and objects that reflect human moods, and
his apparent linking of aesthetic with ethical ideals (with regard to Christian
love, for example)—would all need further treatment before this
suggestion of a Hegelian sympathy for abstraction could be defended. But
Houlgate, in the two articles noted above, already seems to me to go too far in
excluding the abstractionists from the Hegelian aesthetic realm, the realm of
inwardness and “objectless” freedom. The question is not really
about abstraction but about what historical forms allow what Hegel, in his
comments on late romantic art, described as the attempt to preserve something
“substantial” in art (an impetus that already sounds Friedian) (A,
1:602). And that issue cannot be assessed in modernism without attention to the
rather heterodox view of freedom that Hegel defends as the modern
substantiality. This whole situation is, again, made somewhat more difficult by
the influence of Greenberg’s criticism, which treats the autonomy of art
so purely, so “surrenders” (to use Greenberg’s telling word)
to the flatness and materiality of painterly expression, that he makes it hard
to answer the obvious Hegelian question: what does it mean (why does it matter)
that such self-authorizing painterly norms (flatness and frame) so exclusively
lay claim on the aesthetic imagination? (Greenberg, "Towards a Newer
Laocoon," The Collected Essays and Criticism, 1:34).