Day 339 - "Representational" and "abstract"

May 7, 2023

I suspect that Gallery 909 may have been rehung relatively recently to call attention to artists who, in the opinion of the curators, deserve to be better known.  For example, it contains a painting and a sculpture by an artist I had never heard of,  Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who was born in Uruguay, worked largely in Europe,  and was a theorist as well as practitioner of art. He co-founded an association for furthering the development of abstraction that gathered together such artists as Jean Arp and Kandinsky and was an important influence on Picasso and Joan Miro.  The gallery also displays abstract paintings by, Niles Spencer and Esphyr Slobodkina, other artists previously unknown to me.

Paintings by Arp and Slobodkina lead me to think more about the distinction between "representational" and "abstract" art. .I have thought of representational paintings as those that depict a readily recognizable reality, whatever the genre - still-lifes, portraits, landscapes, history scenes, religious images,  and so on.  The viewer's ability to recognize what she is seeing is central to the artist's intent. "Abstract" paintings, in contrast, are not meant to reproduce or imitate what the eye can see "objectively," but instead, either to distill that reality into forms and colors that express the artist's subjective vision or to abandon that reality altogether in the interest of presenting "pure" forms and colors. 

In the Arp and Slobodkina works, it seems to me that the viewer's ability to recognize the reality that may have inspired an abstract composition is immaterial to the artist's intent for the work. Indeed, I wonder if the titles the painters gave their works are meant to tease the viewer.  The Arp work, which measures about 33 inches wide and 28 inches high, consists of three raised shapes, which to me resemble a tooth, a bagel  and a squiggle, set against a flat background. The tooth and the bagel are painted the same gray as most of the background and the picture's frame; the red squiggle rises above a flat red ovoid form that could be a spoon  or a balloon.   Arp entitled this 1930 work "Torso, Navel, Mustache-Flower."  But who would guess that these are what the shapes suggested to Arp? Similarly, Slobodkina entitled his collage-like painting, which measures about 40 inches high and 27 inches wide, "Pot-Bellied Stove."  Okay, having read the title, I can imagine that the red semicircular form with red circles rising out of is meant to suggest a stove issuing flames. But couldn't it equally well be a bear paw?

Really, whether the viewer shares the artist's interpretation of what the forms mean seems unimportant. What is important is whether the arrangement of shapes and colors pleases the artist. If it pleases the viewer, so much the better for the artist  - it makes his or her production commercially viable. But the viewer can make of the composition whatever he or she will.