AN ABSTRACTED VIEW III

Contemporary Abstract in Dialogue with Early Non-Objective

Paintings, Prints & Works on Paper by:
John Andro Avendaño, Derek David Baron, Rudolf Bauer, Jane Burton, Alexander Calder, Jimmy Ernst, Vincent Keele Sol Lewitt, Gary Logan, Robert Mcnown, Joan Miro, Robert Motherwell, Walter Quirt, Rolph Scarlett, Mark Tobey, Oscar Van Young, Victor Vasarely, Elise Wagner

January 2 – March 1, 2025

The History

At the beginning of the 20th century, as various new theories and genres of Modernism, were emerging – predominantly in Europe – there were among other genres, two distinctly different modes of painting: non-objective and abstract. The former referred to a composition within which there was no recognizable object, (think Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee) while the latter referred to a composition within which the recognizable object (a still life, figure, landscape, etc) was abstracted; still recognizable but clearly altered (think Picasso or Henri Matisse).

Although the recently rediscovered Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) has been recognized as the “first” abstract artist, predating the Russian, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), she was still virtually unknown at the time to most European or American artists, writers, or historians. The Fauvist painter, Kandinsky, a founding member of the “Blue Rider Group”, and influenced by new music theory, began experimenting with non representational painting resulting in a series of paintings in 1912. Ultimately, these became his “signature style”, or what he became best known for and remembered today.

In the late 1940s, Robert Coates, writer and critic for the New Yorker, coined the term “abstract expressionism”, which was by that time the dominant art form in America, particularly in New York. It was heralded as America’s own art movement and elevated its artists and the New York galleries in the post World War II years to new heights of cultural influence, supplanting post-war Paris and the European Moderns. In fact, it became a cultural “tsunami” in that, for many, it was considered the only legitimate art form. For many artists seeking gallery representation, if they weren’t working in Abstract Expressionism, it was unlikely they’d get a show.

But the seeds of Abstract Expressionism had been planted years before through the introduction of automatic and intuitive techniques, called “psychic automatism” attributed largely to European Surrealism, and the efforts of visionary artists, gallery owners, collectors and museum founders.

The Visionaries

Several seminal developments for the American artists were the founding of Societe’ Anonyme by artist and socialite, Katherine Dreier (1877-1952) along with friends, the avant-garde artists, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Man Ray (1890-1976), in 1920; which went on to produce exhibitions of abstract painting, including those of Duchamp, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and others, including Rudolf Bauer (1889-1953).

Then in late 1936 The Museum of Modern Art‘s(MoMA) founding curator, Alfred Barr (1902-1981) produced the first groundbreaking exhibition, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”. It was the largest exhibition in America of European avant-garde at the time, encompassing over 700 works of art and attended by everyone interested in these radical new movements.

There were also a few galleries dedicated to the avant-garde like the Julien Levy Gallery and Pierre Matisse Gallery, who sponsored many shows of the Europeans or the few Americans aligned with Surrealism. Then came the founding of Solomon Guggenheim’s, Museum of Non Objective Painting in 1939.

Solomon Guggenheim, patriarch of the Guggenheim dynasty, having been introduced to a radical new genre of European Modern in the early 1930s – non objective – opened The Museum Of Non Objective Painting, in 1939. Comprised of his personal collection of European non objective painters, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Rudolf Bauer, Robert Delauney, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and Rolph Scarlett, among many others, and under management of his founding curator, Austrian Baroness Hilla ReBay (1890-1967), it quickly became one of the most influential and controversial museums of the day. The collection consisted exclusively of what we now call “abstract” but at that time was still known as “non-objective”:.

The German Bauer and Canadian Scarlett were notable at this time as the second and third most collected artists of Mr. Guggenheim (the Russian Kandinsky being the first) and occupied positions at the museum. Both artist’s paintings, among others, were highly visible in the museum and graced the covers of many of the museum’s exhibition catalogues. Scarlett was the featured lecturer at the museum, explaining to a naive public as to what non-objective was or how to view it, implored them to “listen with your eyes”; the correlation being viewing non objective wasn’t unlike the emotional experience we might have with music. In fact, the musically sounding Lyrical non objective, was a term coined to describe the non-geometric oriented compositions; colorful geometric lines, circles, triangles, and squares being popularly associated often with the genre.

The American Conversion

By the early 1940s, several of the Surrealists, and other European avant-garde artists, now living in exile from their occupied home countries during WWII, had found their American patron in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century Gallery. Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was Solomon Guggenheim’s niece, recently arrived from occupied France with new husband, German Surrealist, Max Ernst, and she was a staunch advocate of Modern art and Surrealism in particular.
The Surrealists began a series of lectures and exhibitions at the New School of Social Research, under the direction of founder, Andre Breton (1896-1966), Among them was one of the youngest members, Chilean Roberto Matta (1911-2002) who broke off from the group to establish his own workshop with the Americans, instructing on automatism and intuitive improvisation. Art historian Martica Sawin wrote, Matta “…wanted to create a splinter group for the Surrealists in exile to rival (Andre) Breton’s stranglehold on the movement.” She quotes American artist (Gerome) Kamrowski (1914-2004) as remembering “Matta was trying to project certain ideas, to get people to visualize time, to develop some sort of symbol, and as you drew automatically, to see what would be a common connector.”

Among Matta’s American artist/students were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956); William Baziotes (1912-1963); Robert Motherwell (1915-1991); Arshile Gorky (1904-1948); Peter Busa (1914-1985); Gerome Kamrowski, and others. Basically, the early painters who, among others, came to be known as the “New York School” or “Abstract Expressionists”.

The Forgotten Museum

Concurrent with the increasing dominance of abstract expressionism in post-war America, was the gradually waning influence of Solomon Guggenheim’s institutional patronage of non-objective through his Museum of Non Objective Painting, following his death in 1948. The Guggenheim family forced Baroness Hilla Rebay’s resignation, increasingly altered the museum’s programming, favoring a wider, more diverse presentation of European and American Modern at the expense of the late patron’s remarkable, ground breaking collection. Many of the works created by Bauer, Scarlett, and others whom the Museum had become the near exclusive patrons of, were banished from the Guggenheim’s revised programming and placed in storage. Rudolf Bauer died a few years later in 1953.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum we know today in NYC, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in 1959 to great fanfare, eleven years after its founder and patron’s passing. But missing from the opening exhibition were most of the museum’s original foundational paintings, so carefully collected and curated by Mr. Guggenheim and the Baroness Rebay. She never set foot inside the new museum in spite of it being her and Guggenheim who’d commissioned Wright and approved the plans and scale model of his revolutionary building. Over the many years that followed this museum’s original mission, and the visionaries responsible for its founding were forgotten.

Canadian-American Rolph Scarlett (1889-1984), whose work had been banished from the museum, hidden away in storage due to the Guggenheim family’s makeover of the museum, remained loyal to Mr. Guggenheim’s memory and to the Baroness Rebay. He later left New York City amid the growing predominance of variations of what he still considered non objective, and moved upstate to Woodstock where he taught and continued to paint. In his bittersweet memoir,“The Baroness, The Mogul, & The Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum” , Scarlett – whose own Pollock-like “drip painting” was being featured in a 1951 group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art recounted, “…one girl came over to me and asked if I were Mr. Scarlett. When I said I was, she asked what I called the painting. I said it was a ‘lyrical non-objective.’ She replied non-objective was a dirty word. We don’t use it here. That is ‘Abstract Expressionism’, nothing more, nothing less.”

This anecdote from Scarlett’s memoir, however subjective it might be in the artist’s telling, personifies the growing American dominance over time of the art-historic narrative; “Abstract” became the popularly accepted term for most non-representational painting. And while many American artists and gallery owners of the late 1940s and 1950s, embracing “abstract expressionism”, went on to become celebrated as American cultural icons, several of the 20th century’s largely forgotten visionaries deserve to be better remembered and celebrated for their critically seminal contributions to the canon of American Modern Art, specifically Abstract – or if you will, non objective – painting. Which over a century later, through its various permutations – Abstract Expressionism, Figurative Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Neoplasticism, Minimalism, to name a few – has become the predominant visual language for many contemporary artists working today.

Artists