Non-objective Art?

At Salted Artist Pop-Up Gallery we exhibit art that often does not reference any objects in the world outside of the painting. Connecting to non-objective art comes naturally to some but is challenging for others. It is not immediately clear why that is. Is it determined by some kind of inherent individual preference? You just like it, or you don’t, and that’s all there is to it? If so, the next question we might ask is: Is it something about people’s psychology that predisposes them to connect, or not, to non-objective art? 

Possibly, exposure to art in childhood, or a class in art history, influences our tastes as adults. My own experience is that I loved abstract expressionism the moment I was first exposed to it in my high school art class. It was new and exciting to me. I had no prior exposure to abstract expressionism, but my parents took me to see lots of ancient and medieval art when I was a child, before I could comprehend the significance of what I was looking at. I remember being dragged into gothic churches to look at what my mother called “the cartoon”….which I now know were paintings expressing the story of the birth of Christ. The same story was depicted another way in every church we went to. I still go find the cartoon whenever I visit a church nowadays, and I drag myself into all the museums I can find. Things from childhood stick with you. They become part of a comforting memory bank hidden somewhere deep in the subconscious.

Non-objective art, of which abstract expressionism is an example, is art that does not reference objects in the world, like barns, stars, or people. It is art about colors, shapes, lines in the art itself. So, a red circle is not meant to be an image of the setting sun, it is just a red circle. 

But why would anyone make art that isn’t about anything out there? When photography was invented it was no longer necessary to paint likenesses of the world, which gave painters the freedom to experiment with other aspects of the painting. 

If someone wants to paint a photographic likeness of a tree, for example, they are trying to make the painting look as if no paint was used. The goal is to make it seem as if the viewer looks directly at the tree itself. The painting is supposed to disappear, as it were, so that we can look at the tree that is represented as if it is there in front of us. 

But a difference that always existed between the tree and the painting of the tree is that the painter has made specific decisions about which side of the tree is depicted, from which angle, and how the tree is framed. The painter is forced to make these decisions because the tree is three-dimensional and the painting is two-dimensional. These decisions determine the composition of the painting. 

Another decision the painter makes is how light hits the tree. At what time is the tree depicted? If the tree is painted in the middle of the day, the contrast will be high and the hue of the painting will be slightly bluish in the shadows, perhaps. If the tree is painted during sunset, the color will be golden yellow, and if it’s painted at night, the color will be dull and the shadows will be longer and sharper if artificial light hits the tree from a sharp angle. A large part of what makes the painting interesting will be determined by the painter’s choices and not by the tree that is depicted. Considering this, the tree can be seen as merely the peg that the painter uses to hang all the colors and lines, the interesting bits of the painting, on. 

When the painter starts to see the object as merely the peg they are no longer limited to certain subjects, the subject of the painting can be the two dimensional space of the painting itself: the blending of colors, the rhythm of lines, the properties of materials used, the properties of the paint, the shape of the painting. In this sense, the painting has acquired a right to exist on its own; it no longer has to conceal itself as the subordinate of an object that it is supposed to show us.

A great example of a painter who became more interested in the properties of the painting than in the depiction of objects in the world is Piet Mondrian:

Evolution of Mondrian Paintings between 1908 – 1921. From Top Left – 1. The Red Tree (1908-1910) 2. The Grey Tree (1911) 3. Flowering Apple Tree (1912) 4. Composition in Blue-Grey-Pink (1913) 5. Piet Mondrian Composition with Grid 8: Checker board Composition with Dark Colours, 1919 6. Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue, 1921.

Mondrian painted trees, among other things, and clearly found himself most interested in the branches. He ended up painting lines and leaving the tree behind. Eventually, he became interested in a certain spiritual language of colors and lines. Looking at the painting on the bottom right, it is not entirely clear if it still references a tree. 

Does it matter? 

In the next post I will look at whether non-objective art is beautiful according to the classical and more modern conceptions of beauty.