Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionist (rather misleadingly attributed in his case, because although one of the greatest protagonists of the style that gave New York painting its cultural supremacy in the 1950s, Rothko not only rejected the label but even dismissed being an abstract painter), is one of my all-time favourite painters and undoubtedly one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. His simple, quiescent, large-scale, nonrepresentational works, with serenely shimmering nebulous blocks of colour, impart a unique transcendence both to the painting and the viewer. Yet, how often do we hear friends and colleagues exclaim: “Oh! Is that a great work of art A three-year-old can do that!” Even more difficult for some people is the idea of seeing works such as Carl Andre’s Lever or Dan Flavin’s The diagonal of May 25, 1963 as art despite the fact that Andre’s ‘sculptures’ and Flavin’s ‘proposals’ are some of the most interesting and imaginative works of minimalism to come out during the 1960s. True, it is very difficult for the uninitiated or uninformed to appreciate or even comprehend most of modern abstract art, but I dare say—at the risk of sounding presumptuous—that I shall attempt, given the constraints of time and space in this issue, to demystify, clarify, and give testimony to the glory of the acts of painting, sculpting, and ‘objectification’: all in themselves a means of solitary contemplative visual communication.

By far, if any term in art is guaranteed to provoke a reaction, it is ‘modern art’. Most will not have a problem with an Henri Matisse, but show them a modern abstract and be assured of a reaction that can range from mere indifference to sheer disgust. People have perennially cogitated, cerebrated, and disagreed over what it is, whether it has any aesthetic aspect at all, and whether it is worthwhile or worthless. So, all said and done, modern artists do have one thing in common: they have—at least at the time of unveiling their art—disrupted, shocked, troubled, or questioned the public’s and critic’s perception of art by essentially challenging all that had transpired and been accepted earlier. Before we go further, let us familiarise ourselves with those precursors that gave rise to modern art (modernism), especially abstraction, which can be said to cause the greatest levels of perplexity and confusion. All art until the early decades of the 20th century can be termed as traditional (figurative) art, which refers to any mode of representation in painting and sculpture that offers the illusion of a perceived reality. In painting, figurative art more or less attempts at representing a three-dimensional visual aspect of nature on a two-dimensional plane (canvas). Ideas and meanings in painting had always followed from the subject—religious, mythological, historical; or portrait, landscape, still life—and from the mode of its re-presentation, whether in terms of perspectival space as a narrative or dramatic mise-en-scène, or of impressionist realisations of everyday objects and events in the natural light, shade, and colour of the perceived world. Also, up until then, the classical arts of the Greeks and the Romans had laid the foundations that set the standards and formed the constants by which all art was to be measured in the majority of European cultures. Thus, success in art was primarily defined by classical exemplars and the continuity of classical principles. The artists of 17th and 18th century Europe, seeking patronage of the rich and powerful, sought to emulate these standards and constants. In France (from the mid 17th century) and in England (from the late 18th century), this authority and sense of continuity was primarily vested in the Academies, viz. Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London (thus, the term academic art usually refers to art executed in the traditional figurative form). The 1860s saw the arrival of impressionism (the name inadvertently stuck after being sardonically coined by critic Louis Leroy for his hostile review of an art show that included Claude Monet’s Impression, Soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) in the mid-1870s), which was quite radical for that period. The impressionists were the first to break the rules of academic painting: Apart from giving colours, which were freely brushed, primacy over line, they also took the act of painting out of the studio—previously, not only still lifes and portraits, but also landscapes had been painted indoors. These artists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting ‘en plein air’, and they used short, ‘broken’ brush strokes of pure, unmixed colour, not smoothly blended as was the custom then; for instance, instead of physically mixing yellow paint with blue to create green, they would place unmixed yellow paint next to unmixed blue paint on the canvas, so that the colours would ‘mingle’ in the eye of the viewer to create the ‘impression’ of green (impressionists took advantage of the mid-19th century introduction of premixed paints in lead tubes—resembling modern toothpaste tubes—that allowed artists to work more spontaneously, both outdoors and indoors. Prior to this, painters made their own paints individually, by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil). They emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details; however, they were still content to look at nature with attention but without passion. Then, in the 1880s, three very different pioneers—Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin—started to push beyond impressionism, trying to find a new moral and emotional framework for their art. Postimpressionism declared that ‘looking is not seeing’ and brought a renewed, almost righteous, ripple of feeling into art that gushed of vividly coloured emotions, which inundated paintings and filled canvases with sensibilities. Out of these postimpressionists, Cézanne, perhaps, had the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century and is often called the ‘father of modern art’. Cézanne, in recognising that his sensations—the complex dynamics of his perception and conception of what he called the motif—were actually his true subject, was a trailblazer in this quest for truth to reality. In his mature work, he developed a painterly means that could express this dialectic of sensation, of seeing and knowing. He strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation and abstract pictorial order—his world is vibrating and alive; everything is faceted; everything is broken up. It is relentless, rebellious, and some may say even hallucinatory, but it also feels remarkably accurate. Structure is established, but space is flattened and erratic, and occurs in layers and sheets. The brushstrokes are all individualized, as though each one were also describing its own course, structure, and being. This was the technique of “passages”, by which Cézanne meant transitions of thin, flat strokes (these can lay claim to be the direct precursors of cubism’s facet of plane), parallel to the picture plane and clearly visible as pigmented medium. Nature turns into a kind of equation of geometric shapes and planes, and culminating points of energy in Cézanne’s frenzied metaphysical landscapes. Things quiver and are on the verge of splintering—everything appears ‘alive’—yet the composition is solid, almost classical. The ‘picture’ was, so to speak, simultaneously a ‘painting’. Nothing like this had ever existed on a flat surface before. Cézanne’s staggeringly inventive and viscerally physical work laid the foundations for the transition of 19th century artistic endeavours to a new and radically different conception of art and artistic enquiry in the 20th century: He can be said to have formed the bridge between impressionism and cubism—early 20th century’s most startling new line of artistic enquiry. In effect, Cézanne was the last prophet of ‘tradinationalism’ and the first saint of non-‘tradinationalism’: He was the last ‘pre-modern’ and the first completely ‘modern’ artist. Pablo Picasso called him “the father of us all”; Henri Matisse referred to him as a “God”. Modernism, in other words, can be said to have come through him, and refers to the new approach to art that placed emphasis on representing emotions, themes, and various abstractions. Artists experimented with new ways of seeing, with fresh ideas about the functions, materials, and nature of art, often moving further towards abstraction, though not necessarily total abstraction; for instance, cubist works cannot be classified as abstract; more appropriate would be semi-abstract or figurative abstract at best (be that as it may, no one can ignore the importance of certain figurative art that came close to abstraction, such as cubism, in the development of absolute abstract art).

Thus, the late 19th century and early 20th century saw the emergence of modernism when some artists consciously deviated from traditional figurative representation (pre-modern art). These modern artists felt constrained, as they came to experience the inherited expression of classical, academic art as unchanging, even unchangeable, and unsuitable for any spontaneous or individual form of expression. In fact, many modern artists felt that traditional art limited and inhibited their capacities to represent the actualities of experience, including spiritual ones, with the kind of intensity or clarity that would reveal the true essence of nature and of being. This state of despair and frustration at the rigidity and impersonality of the ruling art form was a deeply motivating factor in the pursuit and evolution of the ‘modern’. The typical symptoms of modernism are the tendency for shapes, colours, and materials of art to exist on their own, often forming unusual combinations, offering distorted or exaggerated versions of nature and, in some cases, losing all obvious connection to ordinary objects of nature and our visual perception or experience of them. The very first unmistakably discernible signs of these symptoms are observed in the works of the avant-garde artists working in Europe in the first decade and a half of the 20th century, and it was the development of cubism that clearly marks a decisive shift from any known previous styles. Cubism was described retrospectively in the late 1940s by art critic Clement Greenberg as: “the epoch-making feat of 20th century art, a style that has changed and determined the complexion of Western art as radically as Renaissance naturalism once did.” (Some accounts of the origin of modernism may differ, but all are agreed that the birth of cubism and its immediate aftermath are of paramount significance to the evolution of modernism.) However, at the time of introduction, the works and words of the cubist heroes—Picasso: “For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart”; Georges Braque: “I don’t believe in things. I believe in relationships”—was met, by nearly all those who encountered them, with blank incomprehension. But, can anyone really blame them? After all, art had never been described in this manner before, and the recondite transmutative cubist idiom, grotesquely chimeric at times, belied the ingenuity of technique, and the genius behind such transmogrified forms; all that the public saw, perhaps, was the deranged product of a deranged imagination of two probable deranged lunatics; writer, critic Karl Krauss described the work as making “a riddle out of a solution.” While the postimpressionists had declared that looking is not seeing, the cubists with their split-open multiple-aspect forms showed that ‘seeing is not understanding’, and consequently invented visual languages beyond seeing. Thus, modernism, with all its offshoots, broke away from traditional representation in art of the centuries past where the result of art was connected to the appearance of the natural world. The great, enduring idea that painting and sculpture could depict the reality of the world by means of mimesis or through illusionistic representation of nature was suddenly questioned, and the walls of protective illusions of pictorial space were broken. To begin with, these new artists decisively abolished the central importance of the subject to painting. (In classical art of the 18th century and in academic art of the 19th century, technique was conceived of as a means to realise a subject. It was assumed that at the point at which that realisation was achieved, technique as such would cease to be noticeable. It would, as it were, be seen through—this is a distinguishing feature of modernism where technical means are no longer allowed to become transparent.) From this time on, it was possible to think of ideas as finding expression in the act and medium of painting itself, of painting as thinking, or as a material metaphor for the processes by which the eye and the mind apprehend the world and turn it into meaning. A painting was no longer to be regarded as a pictorial representation of objects or events fixed in illusionistic space—it was rather to be viewed and apprehended as an object itself in the world, actively demanding the construction of possible meanings by the viewer. The aim of a painting was not re-presentation but constitution of a pictorial fact (the object) that would be the presentation: the objective was objectification: the painting was not, so to speak, a re-production; the painting was the product. Henceforth, there would be no need for even allusion, let alone illusion. This was an immensely significant turn in the development of art and initiated the revolutionary concept that rejected the traditional idea of painting as an illusion of space behind the literal plane of the canvas: from now on, transparency began to give way to opacity, illusion began to give way to literalness, and thus began the ‘objectification of art’, whereby the art itself became the object to be seen and contemplated upon as an object that exists on its own unique existence, one that is not imitating, recreating, or representing another as an illusion. So, in abandoning the illusion of three dimensional representations on canvases, artists began creating paintings that took to these dimensions literally. (A letter to the New York Times, dated 1943 and signed by Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, stated: “We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” In this now-famous letter written seven years before the turning point in Rothko’s career when he dropped all references to living forms and embraced the abstract form with his signature rectangular floating-field structure, he asserted that “the subject is crucial … . That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.” This statement syllogistically reaffirms that modernism and the subject form are dichotomous in essence.) The meanings of these objects were neither explicit nor implicit; they were not fixed but were fluid and subject to the interpretation of the viewer and the outcome of each unique encounter of a different viewer and the object. As a consequence, an unprecedented role reversal, a kind of Copernican revolution, was effected in art: whereas, previously, the subject of a painting was crucial to its very essence, meaning, and existence—now, it was the viewer who had become the expressive subject, the creator of the object’s meaning. In many cases, these meanings may be either esoteric or beyond verbal expression because many modernists felt that the work no longer had to represent any object at all—the work was the object, and it was the spectator who gave it meaning. Understanding this phenomenal flip in roles is the key to unlocking the significance and value of modernism.

In the 1950s, one of the most vocal proponents of the abstract expressionist movement and originator of the term “action painting” critic Harold Rosenberg said: “The big moment came when it was decided to paint … just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral.” Abstract expressionists such as Rothko and Newman, among others, spoke of striving to achieve the “sublime” rather than the “beautiful”. In general, the impulse was reflective and cerebral, with pictorial means simplified to create a kind of elemental impact. A painting was realised as a revelation of the artist’s authentic identity. Newman described his reductivism as one means of “… freeing ourselves of the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend … freeing ourselves from the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, and myth that have been the devices of Western European painting.” Rothko’s glowing, soft-edged rectangles of luminescent colour provoke a deeply meditative, quasi-religious experience, which is capable of evoking tears in those who conjugate with its “sublime”, cathartic profundity. Another dimension was added in understanding the art of abstract expressionists, which also signalled a significant shift in the aesthetic perspective of artists and critics, when Rosenberg stated: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” (Abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose works epitomise action painting, had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation.) Earlier critics, like Greenberg, had focused on the work’s “objectness”, and it was the physicality of the painting’s clotted, oil-caked surface that was the key to deciphering it as a document of the artist’s existential struggle. Rosenberg’s critique slanted the emphasis from the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art that was in the act or process of the painting’s creation: Rosenberg redefined art as an act rather than an object, as a process rather than a product. Also, for abstract expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lay in its directness and immediacy of expression. For their time, the works of abstract expressionists were vast in scale; moreover, they were meant to be viewed in relatively close environments so that the viewer was virtually enveloped by the experience of confronting the work—Rothko had famously said: “I paint big to be intimate.”

Abstract art does deny the many possibilities of interpretation and re-interpretation that are offered by figurative art; instead, it demands a creative response, an effort of the imagination: Abstract art is confrontational—it demands activity, an active response, rather than the passivity or passive reception that suffices for figurative art. This was not merely an evolutionary metamorphosis but an intellectually violent revolution, a paradigm shift—an absolute rejection of all ideas, ideals, sensitivities, and sensibilities that was known and accepted up until then. The canvas no longer derived its existence and expression as an imitative illusion or replicative rendition, or as sacred, secular, or blasphemous imagery; it was no longer a re-creation—it was in itself the creation. The conduit of the past had snapped; modern abstraction no longer wished to be the vehicle or medium to convey or transpose images already known, already there—it took its place as the perceptible image, as the tangible object. This was the largest intellectual revolution in the history of the visual arts since the Renaissance discovery of perspective, and thus was born the ‘modern’ and the many genres of art associated with it; in fact, no other century has expressed so many isms in art as the 20th century: conceptualism, constructivism, cubism, dadaism, futurism, expressionism, fauvism, minimalism, modern expressionism, suprematism, surrealism, vorticism, etc. In effect, the art environment was so dynamic that the century witnessed not only the spawning but also the spurning of new groups and movements with bewildering rapidity.

Greenberg distinguishes between pre-modernist and modernist art thus: “Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under modernism, these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. … Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a modernist picture as a picture first.” All said and done, we can state with certainty that modern art still remains largely incomprehensible and, in all probability, unattractive to the great majority of people, so how is it that this difficult and mostly unpopular art has played such a significant role in deciding the cultural identity and defining the self-image of a century? Moreover, modernist tendencies are seen at work even in the music and literature of the early 20th century: Musical modernism sees classical harmony and tonality giving way to the development of atonal forms by composers of the Viennese School; literary modernism has poets deviating from conventional patterns of rhyme and metre, and novelists whose forms have discarded the accepted conventions of narrative. These modern eclectic works, being esoteric, have been admired by many but understood only by a few; they were never hugely popular. However erudite one may be, who can deny that an aura of difficulty still clings to the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, to the poetry of TS Eliot, and to the novels of Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Modernism was a sort of cultural revolution involving aesthetics, involving the pursuit of change, involving avant-gardism, involving experimentation, involving personal freedom, involving freedom of expression—all these driven by rapid technological progress, political ferment and upheaval, realities newly revealed by science, dynamics newly discovered by mathematics and physics, new ideas in psychology, and post-Darwinian, post-Mendelian developments in biology, in religion and what used to be called ‘natural philosophy’. Creativity no longer knew any bounds or was restrained by sociological mores, and it broke free from the moralistic shackles that had hitherto constrained artistic freedom and experimentation. This was not a malaise but an addiction to exploration that was here to stay, and its endurance in 20th century art eventually symbolises the artistic tolerance that is required of any society that believes in evolving and attaining a higher aesthetic and social ideal.

The claim of being the first totally abstract painting could very well belong to Kazimir Malevich’s famous and extraordinary Black Suprematist Square (Robert Delaunay’s remarkable First Disc may also be counted among the first-ever abstract paintings). On seeing Malevich’s creation, what does one make of it? One may be justified even in asking: “In what sense is this art? Is this an image at all?” It is, after all, only a black square—that too, neither perfectly square nor perfectly aligned; a slight tilt is perceptible—painted on a white background. Moreover, those who will state that it can be most readily replicated by a three-year-old are correct, as it definitely can be very easily reproduced by even a non-painter. So, why is this painting so extraordinary? Why is it, perhaps, the most famous blank in the history of modern art? Why has it created such a lot of interest? Why have histories of 20th century art attached such inordinate importance to it? The answer lies in that decisive, apocalyptic moment, when Malevich obliterated in this supreme manifestation any pictorial illusion whatsoever of three dimensions, thereby banishing from his suprematist paintings the recessive spaces and modelled forms of post-Renaissance art, the naturalistic light and colour of impressionism, and the fleeting glimpses of the objective world that is discernible in cubism. The genius lies not merely in the simplicity or literalness of the black square, but more so in the stupendous discovery that led to its creation, the purgatory; it was cataclysmal—in one astonishing moment of intuition, with that epiphanic masterstroke, Malevich severed all ties with the past; he trashed all values held sacred up till then. Indeed, Malevich had earlier painted some coloured geometric shapes on the same canvas that were triumphantly superimposed by the black square at the dramatic moment of his great realisation—he expunged the known, embraced the unknown. And what a colour to use to execute this new beginning: Black, the non-colour, the colour of void, the colour of emptiness, the colour of darkness, the colour of death; but, at the same time, it can also be realised as the ultimate fullness, the dark space that gives birth to light, the black into which everything is gathered and dissolved, the distilled precipitation and ultimate purity of creation, matter, and life itself: Malevich’s Black Suprematist Square was literally and metaphorically the ‘ending and beginning of painting’; it sounded the death knell for the old and became the harbinger of the new. In time, this seminal work would become the progenitor of a multitude of created forms where dynamic relations are called for between the imagined space of the painting and the mind rather than a perfunctory glance at the imaginary space of a picture. In his manifesto, ‘From Cubism to Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting’, Malevich declared: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form and fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of Academic art. I have destroyed the circle of the horizon and escaped from the circle of objects, the horizon-ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature. The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is the living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art.” So, when the surface of a modern abstract painting is looked at, it is usually just that: a surface, not a metaphor of a body or a space within the picture, but an object within a world of other objects. Decades later, in an interview given in the 1960s, minimalist and post-painterly abstractionist Frank Stella stressed: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. What you see is what you see.” It is interesting to note that for American minimalists such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd, the ‘literalness’ of their work was in contrast with the ‘humanism’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ that they found evident even in the most abstract of European art such as in a Malevich or a Piet Mondrian, or a Wassily Kandinsky. Modern art includes work up to or about the 1970s; recent art production is more often characterised as contemporary art or postmodern art. It is also important to note that modern art or modernism does not cover all works of art of the ‘modern’ period—rather, the term is ascribed to only certain works of art to distinguish these from others (figurative). Moreover, works classified as modern do not imply a particular style or technique but rather a value associated with them; for instance, despite being painted around the same period, the styles and techniques employed in the canvases of a serenely emotive and intuitive Mondrian and a highly energetic and phantasmagoric Kandinsky cannot be more disparate, yet their values in realising the modern distinguish their works as modern. In general, one can say that those termed as modern are products of evolutionary ideas, ideals, dialectics, energies, enquiries, thoughts, etc., and revolutionary discoveries, processes, techniques, materials, media, and so forth.

In conclusion, it can be said that modern art, especially in the state of absolute abstraction, will never be everyone’s idea of art, let alone good art. There is no doubt that abstract art requires a constructive and more involved response from its viewer. For those of us who wish to understand modernism and its significance, we need to be prepared to start afresh and look without any harboured prejudices, we need to do away with any preconceived repression, we need to break free of our habits of expectation; we need to respond directly to the rhythm and dynamics of relations between the visible elements of colours, non-colour and forms, non-form; tabula rasa, no less. (By the late 1940s, Rothko had ceased to affix conventional subject titles to his works, as he felt that these would be too prescriptive, whereby locking the work into preconceived meanings or notions, thereby eliciting directed or dictated responses.) Eventually, art in all forms is an ongoing, living discourse between artists and their works, artists and their public, and artists and their critics that has taken place across generations, backwards and forwards in time. We need to accept the objects and thoughts being expressed or rejected by the modernists, and we need to accept their attempts at transferring pure emotion or non-emotion directly into art, keeping in mind the intellectual and creative ferment that may or may not have contributed in the evolution and development of their work. Nothing can be more appealing than abstract art when understood well and in totality, in which all parts of the work play an equally vital role in the absolute, the gestalt, and where the space even harnesses accidents that may have occurred during the process of creation. In many ways, abstraction has always been there and will always be there. Writer, critic Mel Gooding states: “All art is abstract, in the sense that all art engages with the world and abstracts aspects of it in order to present us with an object or an event that enlivens or enlightens our apprehension of it.” At the outset, I had mentioned that giant of 20th century modern art—Mark Rothko—and I shall end with an oft-quoted succinct phrase of his that will serve as well as anything for guidance when contemplating not only his luminous works but also of others. Once, when asked why he would never discuss the meaning of his work, Rothko whispered:

“Silence is so accurate.”

By Sunil K Sukumaran